D has become unbearable and it needs to stop

[bachmeier]

On Thursday, 8 June 2023 at 15:11:50 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer 
wrote:

> An LTS branch needs at least one dedicated person to keep it up 
> to date with any bug fixes that happen in the main line. This 
> is not a trivial task.

But that's not the purpose of an LTS release. You do it so you 
can share your code with others without having to support every 
compiler release for the last several years. A good example for 
another language is what R does for Ubuntu releases:

https://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/

Some background: It's a nightmare trying to install R packages on 
Linux these days because that's traditionally been done from 
source. One of the prolific package writers adds insane numbers 
of dependencies like he's writing Javascript, and many of those 
dependencies require compilation of C++, which has miserable 
compile times. It's not unusual to spend more than an hour 
installing a single package because you need a single function it 
provides. Since it got to the point of impractical to use R on 
Linux, someone created the c2d4u repo. As it says on the linked 
page: "The ‘c2d4u’ repository is only available for LTS 
releases." It doesn't matter which release is labeled LTS, what 
matters is that Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 are the only things they 
have to support - but they couldn't do that with Ubuntu labeling 
one of their releases every two years as LTS.

That's not to say that big fixes couldn't be backported if they 
were valuable. Just that it's orthogonal to LTS.