Security support change after 7.4 release and 8.0

[bszollos]

Hi,

For me the support release is a bit contradicting or maybe not explained well https://redis.io/about/releases/
Based on the examples, I expected to see 7.0 as one of the supported branches when 7.4 came out.
Can someone explain why 7.2 and 6.2 are supported here?
"The previous minor version of the latest stable release.
The previous stable major release."

If this means
The previous minor version of the latest stable release = previous minor version
The previous stable major release = last minor version of previous major release

what happens with the example of when 3.0 comes out both 2.0 and 2.2 are supported, wouldn't it be just 2.2?

so based on the example support rule is
The previous minor version of the latest stable release = last minor version of previous major release
The previous stable major release = last major version
but this would mean that after 7.4 release, both 6.2 and 7.0 are supported. and actually what is dropped from the support list is 7.2
#13448 (comment)
"When version 2.2 is the latest stable release, both 2.0 and 1.2 are maintained."

so now that I'm properly confused, what will be dropped with the release of 8.0?
7.4 will stay if that is the last minor release of the previous major version.
so 7.2 or 6.2?

thanks in advance

[sundb]

ping @oranagra

[LiorKogan]

Your first interpretation is the correct one, but I guess we need to document the policy for a new major release:

With the first release of a new stable major, we will also support the two latest minors of the previous stable major.
So with 8.0 - it would be 7.4 and 7.2.

Then, with 8.2 - it would be 8.0 and 7.4, and with 8.4 it would be 8.2 and 7.4

@oranagra please confirm.

[shazib-summar]

@LiorKogan @oranagra

Thank you for the clarification. Is it correct to say that the latest three minor releases are supported at any time?

[LiorKogan]

No.
Suppose we have 7.4, 8.0, 8.2 and now we introduce 8.4 - we will drop support for 8.0 but will keep support for 7.4
Then, on 8.6 we will drop support for 8.2 but still keep support for 7.4

[LiorKogan]

Update: for 8.0 we decided to continue supporting 6.2 till, at least, end of 2025.

[oranagra]

it's a little hard (for me) to follow all these nuances and examples, so i'll try to explain the reasoning that i suppose is behind this.

let's say that 6.0 was a successful version, that many people used, it is likely that 6.2 contains a bunch of nice updates, but no major architecture change or command breaking change. so in theory, everyone who used 6.0 can probably safely upgrade to 6.2 (it could be that they can't easily upgrade to 7.0), and that's the one we prefer to maintain.
rather than maintaining 6.0 which is more outdated.

another reasoning is that we don't want to keep maintaining code that's too old (harder), so we prefer to maintain 6.2 rather than 6.0, and as soon as 8.0 is out, we rather not keep maintaining both 7.x and 6.x.

[bszollos]

Thanks for the explanation