[Building Sakai] Information regarding deprecating Foundation support for older Sakai versions

[Pieter Hartsook]

The following is a summary of the Sakai Foundation policy and practice
regarding support for older versions:

The Sakai open source community develops, tests, and maintains the code for
all Sakai releases. For the most current release and the immediate prior
release, the Sakai Foundation uses its resources to oversee and manage the
development, QA testing, patching, and release of incremental numbered
versions.

For earlier versions, the Foundation no longer provides this oversight and
coordination of the community contribution to the codebase. This does not
mean that these earlier versions are not used and maintained by some
institutions in the community, they are. Institutions running an older
version may of course continue to do so, applying patches, bug fixes, and
enhancements as they wish. These modifications are committed to the Sakai
SVN code repository and are available for others to use if they wish. But
the Foundation does not coordinate testing or validation of the code
changes, and does not create a concomitant roll-up into an incremental
release.

The Foundation and most of the community are focused on maintaining the
current versions and development toward future versions since this provides
maximum benefit to the community at large and is the best use of our
aggregate resources. When possible we recommend upgrading your deployment to
currently supported versions.

In July 2009, Sakai version 2.6.0 was released. Thus, any subsequent changes
to Sakai 2.4.x code are no longer managed by the Foundation and became the
sole responsibility of the individual institutions. No new versions of 2.4
will be released. When version Sakai 2.7.0 is released, the same change will
happen to the currently supported version 2.5.x.

A wiki page describing the development life cycle process is located at:
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/SAKDEV/Sakai+Developer+Practices

Pieter Hartsook
---
Communications Manager, Sakai Foundation
| hartsook at sakaifoundation.org | voice & SMS: 510-842-7438 | Skype & AIM:
hartsook |
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