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On Sep 21, 2015, at 7:11 PM, Michael Enright wrote:
> 
> The blindness was blindness to the fact that new users were getting a
> different version than existing users in some way other than fixing
> vulns.

Why should you believe that in the first place?  There is only one Cygwin, so why would you expect that it or its standard packages have had no features in the last N years?  You’d expect to see at least two different Cygwins, a stable one and a bleeding-edge one, if that were happening.

> one assumes that constant incorporation of upstreams, constantly
> switching away from unmaintained upstreams to maintained-but-different
> upstreams etc is what the Cygwin user base wants.

Yes, Cygwin is basically a bleeding-edge type of “OS” distribution.[*]  It ships whatever is current, as long as there are maintainers willing and able to keep its packages up to date.

This is the case because almost all of the packages in Cygwin are maintained by people who do not get paid by a Cygwin organization to do so.  These maintainers are either scratching their own itches or just plain volunteering.  Therefore, you get whatever is good for each package’s maintainer, which may or may not match with what is good for you.



[*] Never mind that Cygwin and its package set runs on top of an existing OS.  That’s a side issue, as far as this discussion goes.

> Do Cygwin'ers ever debate or think about an LTS track for Cygwin?

If it comes up, it does so so rarely that I can’t remember the last time it did.

LTS generally implies a business model,[**] and as far as I know, the current Cygwin business model only pays for one person’s time:

  http://www.redhat.com/services/custom/cygwin/

She’s plenty busy already without adding LTS distro maintenance on top of that.

I expect if the Cygwin support and license buy-out businesses were making enough money for Red Hat that an LTS version of it would already exist.

I suspect this is what is behind the weak push to get all packages cygport-ified and set up an automated build server.  But, this is still in the planning stages, AFAIK, and thus may never become a reality.


[**] Canonical is unprofitable, but has Shuttleworth’s millions backing its LTS releases.  Red Hat is very profitable, which indirectly sustains the RHEL clones,[***] but that’s no model for a Cygwin LTS, since you need RHEL to clone from in the fist place.

[***] And all the stuff built on top of RHEL clones indirectly sustains Red Hat, so it all works out.  But other than the license buy-out, I don’t see how people building stuff on top of Cygwin helps Red Hat.

> Is that why there's a "time machine?”

There is a time machine because Peter Castro has kindly decided to provide one. It is not an official product of the Cygwin project.  (The URL should have been enough of a clue as to this fact.)

The time machine could go away at any time.  We are grateful to have it for as long as it exists.
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