HHVM 3.3 - First Release with Long Term Support (LTS)

HHVM is known for its high speed of development: currently the same code falls on Github as is used for Facebook, and versions are released every 8 weeks. This is impressive, although repulsive, if you think about it in the context of building a business or infrastructure.

The HHVM team understands that in order to achieve greater coverage, users must get some sort of commitment in order to be confident in the stability and security of already released versions.

Agreement

Starting from version 3.3, the HHVM team will constantly support 2 releases (releases with long-term support, Long-Term Support) with a difference of about 6 months (24 weeks, to be exact), which in fact will give an effective support cycle in almost a year long. As an example, HHVM 3.3, which is scheduled for release on September 11, 2014, will be supported up to version 3.9 (8 * 6 = 48 weeks, about 11 months). Accordingly, 3.6 (due out 24 weeks after 3.3) will be maintained for the next 6 releases. Entangled? Take a look at the table:

Version Name	Estimated Release Date	Lts?	End of support
3.3	September 11, 2014	Yes	August 13, 2015
3.4 *	November 6, 2014	not
3.5 *	January 1, 2015	not
3.6 *	February 26, 2015	Yes	January 28, 2016
3.7 *	April 23, 2015	not
3.8 *	June 18, 2015	not
3.9 *	August 13, 2015	Yes	July 14, 2016
3.10 *	October 8, 2015	not
3.11 *	December 3, 2015	not
3.12 *	January 28, 2016	Yes	December 29, 2016
3.13 *	March 24, 2016	not
3.14 *	May 19, 2016	not
3.15 *	July 14, 2016	Yes	June 15, 2017

* release names not yet defined
')

Official distributions

In addition to the above, the team makes great efforts to promote official packages to the main Debian archive, from where they should get into the Debian-stable repositories, Ubuntu, and other Debian-based OSs. It is the intention to maintain the support versions that fall into the LTS releases of these distributions throughout its entirety, releasing security fixes.

Also, despite the fact that the team’s resources are limited and packages for distributions such as Fedora are unlikely to go to the official repository, they will be supported.

Types of updates for LTS releases

What types of updates can I expect? An important question for the community and a big burden for the team. It all depends on the severity of the problems.
Security issue In any case, yes.
Support for new functionality, without violating backward compatibility? Yes, if it does not imply large architectural changes.
Patches support compatibility with frameworks? Probably yes.

But it is worth noting that LTS releases are unlikely to receive serious functional updates. Security fixes will have the highest priority, everything else will need to be considered, balancing between the amount of work on patching, testing, and the benefits of these changes.