Every software project is faced with the challenge of balancing the need to innovate and introduce new features, with the interest of many users in minimizing their maintenance costs and avoiding the risks that inevitably come with software upgrades. One way to meet this challenge is to provide a Long-term Support (LTS) release with an extended release cycle.
For the past several years, a small and dedicated group of community members led by Eileen McNaughton (Fuzion NZ) and Nicolas Ganivet (Cividesk) has done most of the hard work and heavy lifting to maintain version 4.2 as a "community-supported" LTS release. This has worked well, but there have been some inefficiencies due to not having a centralized repository for the LTS version of the codebase.
Given the increasing importance of a reliable LTS for many members of the community, the LTS team approached the Core Team with a...