LTS versions

[PukPukov]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

With new release cadence from mojang updating your server to new minecraft version is unsustainable, you need to do it every quarter while even core updates themself are taking much longer (there are already 1.21.6 snapshots and 1.21.5 is still in early beta), not even talking about plugins that breaks now much more often due to less backward compatibility in bukkit api. And I dont want to receive all that hate that comes out of using outdated software.

Describe the solution you'd like.

So my proposion are LTS versions. They will receive bugfixes even after new version is released, but no feature-backports (unless user PRs). The next planned LTS version gets its LTS title (and previous LTS becomes outdated) not the day it releases out of beta, but after quarter or so to provide time for bug catching.

The first LTS could be 1.21.4.

Describe alternatives you've considered.

Other

No response

[electronicboy]

it is already demanding enough to try to keep up with the current main branch, managing multiple versions at once is just not something we have the resources to commit to

[masmc05]

plugins that breaks now much more often due to less backward compatibility in bukkit api

Bukkit api has very good backwards compatibility, excluding what's annotated as experimental.
Almost always it's due to plugins using nms to compensate lack of api in spigot or lack of that api in old versions, which in most cases paper had an api with good backwards compatibility. The better solution is to ask plugin developers to use less nms when possible, even with the cost of removing support of spigot or older versions.

[PukPukov]

Java experience shows us that backporting bugfixes is easy, and that makes sense, bugfixes are almost always consist of one line of code change and multiple hours of research that you dont need to redo for backporting. And users will still use old versions, because not a lot have time to make the same work every quarter. Just this versions they use will have bugs that they will step on.

[lynxplay]

This is a resource question and our teams limited resources are better spend improving the server software instead of maintaining one or more legacy versions for users that do not want to put in the effort of updating.
We maintain 1.21.4 for now as .5 is experimental and have generally given a grace period for the most recent legacy version when it comes to e.g. exploit fixes.

To prevent any potential reply of yours to further imply our team of unpaid volunteers needs to do more work because some server administrators do not want to work on updating the servers, I have locked this conversation.
The project is open source, you are free to maintain such versions for yourself.