Are there v17 minor versions that will not be supported anymore?

[VolkerBarth]

This is somewhat related to that question on the EOL for v16 at the end of this year.

According to that, starting with 2019, only v17 will be an "active" and supported version (well, at least until a new major version will be available).

With older versions, there was often a different support plan resp. EOL date for minor versions, say, 12.0.0 was archived way earlier than 12.0.1 (the latter Dec 2016).

As v17 comes in several flavours like 17.0.0, 17.0.4 up to 17.0.9, will all of these versions be supported, or only the newest ones, say 17.0.8. and 17.0.9?

In other words: Are we supposed to use "current" v17 versions in order to be fully supported?

[Breck_Carter]

To answer a question with a question: Have there been ANY updates to 17.0.x issued after 17.0.x+1 became available, for any x = 0, 1, 2, ...

If the answer is "no" then you have your answer: none of the earlier minor versions are supported, where the definition of "support" means "if a bug is found and fixed then an update for that version will be released".

[Breck_Carter]

The world is rapidly moving towards the Brave New Cloud Version of support, pioneered by Google and others, where you always use the latest version no matter how crappy it is 🙂

(with the docs being a year out of date, or worse, and there's no What's New... 🙂

[VolkerBarth]

Hm, don't know if I can really answer that, altough I vote for a "no"...

I guess I still have not fully "seen the light"... to cite from Chris's answer:

Because of releases for those products which use the SQL Anywhere code, our development team made the decision to use the third part of the version number to help distinguish between branches of the code, and keep the changes in our code organized.

The explanations by Mark and Chris have left me thinking that there might be reasons to offer further fixes for a 17.0.n version used within one SAP product independent of fixes in a 17.0.n+1 version. But in my experience (aka the released packages), that has not happened.

[MarkCulp · Accepted solution]

Chris has written about the 17.0.x.bbbb numbering scheme now being used for SQL Anywhere (since June 2016). Chris did not mention explicitly but Breck correctly identified, once 17.0.(x+1).bbbb is released the intention is that there will be no more 17.0.x releases. Effectively 17.0.(x+1) is a roll up of the fixes made to 17.0.x but may also contain additional enhancements/features.

[VolkerBarth · Accepted solution]

Mark, thanks for the clarification. But does that mean only the last 17.0.n minor version is "actively supported"?

[MarkCulp · Accepted solution]

Disclaimer: This discussion is talking about the future so any statement that is made is a "forward looking statement". Anything said here is subject to change.

AFAIK after the end of this year (2018) if you hit an issue that requires a fix to be made to the software, you will need to apply a 17.0.n patch where 'n' is the latest released version of 17. For v17, this has been the case since ~June 2016 (See Chris' statement cited earlier).