Sustained Laravel 6 (LTS) support

[Harti]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Laravel 6.x is the current LTS support release (until 2022), but this library abandoned Laravel 6.x starting with 0.8.x.

 Problem 1
    - Installation request for genealabs/laravel-model-caching ^0.8.3 -> satisfiable by genealabs/laravel-model-caching[0.8.3].
    - Conclusion: remove laravel/framework v6.18.8
    - Conclusion: don't install laravel/framework v6.18.8
    - genealabs/laravel-model-caching 0.8.3 requires illuminate/http ^7.0

Describe the solution you'd like Compatible PRs shall also be merged into 0.7.x releases in order to include bug fixes for Laravel 6.x users.

Describe alternatives you've considered Alternatively, the dependency tree should be less strict in the composer.json (to allow for usage of Laravel 6.x) - but I'm not sure if this lib does truly require illuminate/http:^7.0.

Additional context It is not viable for some users to upgrade to Laravel 7 right now because they are bound to use LTS releases for stability and financial reasons.

[mikebronner]

Hi @Harti, thanks for writing in. We will only ever support the current Laravel release. There are various reasons why LTS is a fallacy, which I won't get into here. However, you are welcome to fork the library and make any necessary changes to run on your versions.

[Harti]

@mikebronner Would you kindly provide a link that elaborates on your claim of LTS being a fallacy? And please don’t refer to that one single blog post on Medium that doesn’t even have clear arguments. I’ve read that one, and highly disagree. (In enterprise it costs much more to disrupt development with stepwise Framework upgrades, and the sum of work is the same if you do it after three years.)

I understand your point, but I’d still love to learn about the reasons.

[mikebronner]

https://medium.com/@jasonmccreary/laravel-lts-is-a-trap-97b1d1103961 https://connortumbleson.com/2019/01/28/lts-is-a-lie/ https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/laravel/lts-or-latest-version-which-should-be-used

Google is your friend.

And my reasons:

• it creates too many dependency conditions when maintaining open-source packages.
• you projects loose versatility, as most active packages support the current Laravel version.
• it leads to dead projects, especially when maintaining multiple projects, as the effort to upgrade them to the latest version is delayed, and eventually too much to take on.
• as I don't use LTS versions of Laravel, it would be a waste of my time to try to continue to support it, especially when I don't have projects to test it in.
• writing automated tests for multiple versions of Laravel is a huge increase in complexity, which takes a lot of effort to maintain. I have tried it in the past, and it was never worth it.

I'll be happy to consider sticking to LTS for the right sponsorship level.