CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Welcome to the CiviCRM 4.2 "long term support" forum!

The objective of this forum is to help users, integrators and developers still using CiviCRM 4.2. This initiative emerged from the desire for more stability and longer-term support for critical bugs and security issues. While we encourage to always use the latest CiviCRM version, those who are still running 4.2 may need more time to prepare their users before upgrading their CRM to the next major version.

We will focus on identifying bugs in 4.2 that have been fixed in the latest version, and may benefit from fixing that issue in 4.2 as well. The recommended process is therefore:

• If the bug can be produced in the latest version, report the issue in the main forums. You can test for bugs on the demo sites (http://demo.civicrm.org/) of the current stable version (currently 4.3.x).
• If the bug only occurs in 4.2, and can be reproduced on the 4.2 demo sites (http://drupal.demo42.civicrm.org/), try to find a bug report that may have been filled against 4.3 or later, and try to "backport" the solution to 4.2.

Feature requests or support questions not specific to 4.2 should be posted in the other forums.

We will also backport security patches to 4.2 on the "long term". The defined date for security patches support has, for the moment, been defined as possibly 1 or 2 years, therefore April 2014 or April 2015.

This is a new initiative, driven by volunteers of the CiviCRM community. We thank you for your support and understanding, as this initiative moves forward. If you appreciate this initiative, please consider donating to CiviCRM in order to support the server infrastructure that makes this possible: http://civicrm.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=47

I replayed a couple of conversations in my mind realized one thing - the word "stability" can have dual meanings and be lost in translation sometimes.  In a purely technical sense, anytime you change something (even for the better) that action is by nature, UNstable.   Thus in a strict definition stability is only achieved by changing nothing, even if that means leaving a bug broken.   It's still broken, but it's stable.  However, that's not what we desire. 

This is pure technical and english semantics, but I suggest we change our wording to use reliability which isn't that what we really want with LTS?  We are willing to make changes, introduce a little bit of instability for the sake of fixing bugs and making broken features work and getting reliability.

Agreed?

PS. MLutfy, in your 3rd paragraph above I think you meant to say "identifying bugs in 4.3"