Hi Jean Philippe,
First thing: limesurvey.org offers a SaaS where we host thousands of professional users. We guarantee them a continuous service, and they feel in a perfectly stable environment. We manage for them the updates, and let them choose when they should upgrade to a new major version.
To answer directly to your question:
What is the release cycle of versions?
we're in a typical open source approach: release early, release often. we're trying to make LimeSurvey evolve a lot since few years, so this is for us the perfect software development philosophy:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Release_early,_release_often
We're pushing the LimeSurvey users to update and upgrade as much as possible, fixing bugs and adding features on the fly.
We don't have so many people in the community involved in testing the beta of the new major versions (like 3.0). So when we release a major one, we often publish a lot of bug fixes in the coming weeks after that. But indeed, this is the case for most software, and we don't release new major version that often. We're now at 3.x, and 4.x should not be out before end of 2019, maybe 2020. Also, survey themes and question themes will be compatibles between 3.0 and 4.0, so it should not be a big deal to upgrade.
What is the general support for released versions? For how long is a major/minor version supported (bug fixes and security fixes)?
About the "LTS" concept, as I told you first: we're having people on our SaaS still using the the 2.73 version. So we must apply to it the security fixes, and if they're critical (this doesn't happen often) we do it immediately. Also, LimeSurvey is Open Source, and any one can fork it. Denis Chenu, a french developer and one of the contributor of LimeSurvey core, host a fork of LimeSurvey 2.06 for his clients. He applies to it not only the security fixes, but also fixes for PHP 7 hosting, and even improvements of his own:
github.com/SondagesPro/LimeSurvey-SondagesPro
Is there some kind of security vulnerabilities announcements somewhere
If any security release is done, you'll have a clear alert about it in your installation at login via the comfortUpdate component. Git commits related to security are prefixed with
[security], eg:
github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/commit/...c8424b3005deb49a47f7
To summarize:
If you use our SaaS, you don't have to worry about anything. Your installation will be maintained by the team, we'll update for you your installation, you'll feel in a perfectly stable environment. If we do a major release, you'll can upgrade when you feel ready.
If you're in self hosted environment, subscribe to the comfortUpdate for easy update.
Then, update in two cases:
- each time we do a security release (clearly warn after login)
- when you face a bug in your installation (we're now at 3.14, and only advanced features still have some small bugs)
- and at least once a month, or each couple of month, to get the new features and the minor fixes.
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