... getting geometrically shorter, is a crock.

Would you care to elaborate?

I don't remember seeing an official written support policy anywhere before 5.12.3 in 2011-Jan

Or for that matter a release schedule.

I like the new commitment from the community and I think two major versions, and 3 years of security fixes is enough official support -- with any backporting done by those who need it.

5.18.0 is projected for 2013-05-18, so the release schedule is fairly stable -- looks like a good idea to me and definitely not a crock.

For those who want to know see perlpolicy#MAINTENANCE AND SUPPORT

This document codifies the support and maintenance commitments that the Perl community should expect from Perl's developers:

• We "officially" support the two most recent stable release series. 5.12.x and earlier are now out of support. As of the release of 5.18.0, we will "officially" end support for Perl 5.14.x, other than providing security updates as described below.
• To the best of our ability, we will attempt to fix critical issues in the two most recent stable 5.x release series. Fixes for the current release series take precedence over fixes for the previous release series.
• To the best of our ability, we will provide "critical" security patches / releases for any major version of Perl whose 5.x.0 release was within the past three years. We can only commit to providing these for the most recent .y release in any 5.x.y series.
• We will not provide security updates or bug fixes for development releases of Perl.
• We encourage vendors to ship the most recent supported release of Perl at the time of their code freeze.
• As a vendor, you may have a requirement to backport security fixes beyond our 3 year support commitment. We can provide limited support and advice to you as you do so and, where possible will try to apply those patches to the relevant -maint branches in git, though we may or may not choose to make numbered releases or "official" patches available. Contact us at <perl5-security-report@perl.org> to begin that process.

See also http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl-5.17.1/Porting/release_schedule.pod, perlhist

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