[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH 00/26] Major library version bump

[James Almer]

On 1/26/2023 7:49 PM, Jean-Baptiste Kempf wrote:
> Tbh, I don't see why we should do a 5.2, seeing that 6.0 would be the same features-set with just the ABI change, aka removing deprecated symbols.
> 
> Also, doing a 5.2 which would not be a LTS, while 5.1 is a LTS is not only very weird, but it also goes against what we said last time, that the last of the 5.x would be LTS (similar for 7.1).

The idea of making one last release before the major bump was to give 
users "stuck" with a given soname something with the latest development.
For example, Debian will allegedly ship 5.1 with bookworm (soft freeze 
is in two weeks). Users could then drop 5.2 libraries on their system 
without having to also recompile every single package that depends on 
ffmpeg.
This used to be the case when our release schedule was not really set in 
stone and a release was considered LTS when distros happened to ship it.

So i guess that yes, from now we should effectively make the LTS the 
last release of a given soname, and do the bump soon after it. An 
hypothetical 5.2 would not get support for too long and eventually it 
will become less secure to drop them into a bookworm system just to get 
some extra features added in the past few months.