Nothing is forever, and releases of Hibernate projects are no exception. This policy describes how the Hibernate team decides which versions of the code are maintained, and to which extent.
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Hibernate projects comply with this policy on a best-effort basis. Commercial offerings for long-term support or end-of-life support may provide stronger, contractually binding guarantees. |
Background
Discussions about maintenance invariably depend on versioning and compatibility.
Here is a summary of that information which should help understand the next sections:
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A series is the set of releases for a given
{major}.{minor}combination, e.g. 6.0, 6.1, or 6.2. -
Pre-Final releases (Alpha, Beta and CR) are actively in-development and subject to justifiable API and SPI changes within their series.
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Final releases mark the end of active development of a series and the start of stable maintenance.
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"Maintenance" of a series here means:
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accepting bug reports (considering them valid) when they make sense;
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applying bugfixes when they make sense;
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actively producing releases.
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Scope
Hibernate is a series of large projects, and yet its core development team is amazingly small - which means that we need to pick our battles.
For that reason, the Hibernate team only commits to maintenance of the latest stable series.
There is no official concept of long-term community support for Hibernate projects, though older series may still receive some bugfixes contributed in the context of commercial Long-Term Support.
Levels
Series can be categorized according to their maintenance level, which we communicate on our website through the following labels:
- latest-stable/stable
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Series which are considered stable and fully maintained: we will apply reasonable bugfixes, but will postpone new features and enhancements to later series.
- development
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Series in pre-Final development, which are generally maintained at the same level as latest-stable/stable releases, except that we reserve the right to make changes in new API and SPI.
- limited-support
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A level of maintenance between latest-stable/stable and end-of-life.
Backports to these series are highly restricted and releases are not guaranteed.
We recommend that you upgrade to a newer series if possible or look for paid support which may provide stronger guarantees.
- end-of-life
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The version has reached the end of its maintenance and support lifecycle.
We recommend that you upgrade to a newer series, if possible, because we are unlikely to fix bugs or provide new releases for this series.
Takeaways
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Only bug-reports verified against the latest-stable/stable and development series are accepted.
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Bug-fixes are only applied to latest-stable/stable and development (and sometimes to limited-support) series.
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New features and improvements are only applied to development (and sometimes to latest-stable/stable) series.
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Only development and latest-stable/stable series are actively released. Occasional releases of limited-support series may happen, but should not be expected.
