SciML's Stance on Long Term Support (LTS)

Long-term support is always a balance between spending time developing new exciting features and supporting older Julia versions to allow users to more easily keep up. In the v1.0 LTS era and the Julia v0.x times, SciML has explicitly not supported the Julia LTS for multiple reasons, mostly because the later Julia versions included lots of bug fixes specifically designed for the SciML repositories (making Julia v1.0 LTS tenuous to use even until its last day!).

However, with Julia v1.6 becoming the new LTS, a version which all libraries fully support, SciML is adopting the position of supporting the LTS. This means that the following strategies will be employed:

Lastly, we encourage other organizations to adopt a similar strategy.

One last note, please do not mix up the concepts of reproducibility and long-term support in issues discussing this topic. Reproducibility is for recreating a known analysis. For personal projects, we recommend simply using a Manifest.toml for reproducibility which will work on any version of Julia beyond v1.0. Long-term support is for continually updating/changing projects (usually managed by large organizations or teams) which do not have the manpower for version updates due to labor cost, which can justify the missing performance etc. to compensate. These are two different concepts which entirely different tooling.