General Maintenance Policy

Given the current supported version scheme, the ruby-core policy is as follows:

• MINOR: With "best effort" goal with at least 6 months and at best 3 years or after two newer MINOR releases.
• TEENY: Will be released approximately every 2-4 months.

During this time, the ruby-core team will support maintained versions of Ruby in the following groups:

Bug fix

For general bug fixes, we will support the latest release until a decision is made to end support.

Security fix

After bug fix period has ended, security maintenance will continue until the version is End-of-Life. See security.

End-of-Life and Unsupported Versions

Once a version is End-of-Life, it's your responsibility to deal with bugs and security fixes. An approved commercial party may be able to accept responsibility of maintaining an End-of-Life version.

It's important to recognize the maintainer for each version may decide they can no longer support a version, in which case ruby-core would work to responsibly discontinue the version.

Best Effort

Please understand that we want to focus on improving Ruby for future releases and encourage the use of the latest stable release. The longer a version lives the harder it becomes to maintain it. With the limited resources of ruby-core, it makes it hard for us to maintain more than 2 stable versions at a time.

We're going to give our best effort to support this policy in order to provide a sustainable upgrade path to modern versions of Ruby.