I suggest everyone takes a read through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_support as to what LTS is actually meant to be focused on.
What you (Ben and Matt) are both describing is not LTS but STS ... these are different concepts. For LTS the focus is *stability *and *reduced risk of disruption *which alters the judgement on what is appropriate to put into a release. It then becomes a test of "is this bug fix worth the risk" with the general focus on lowest possible risk which stops this sort of thing happening unless a critical feature is broken. All of the "edge case" examples presented all involve substantial changes to implementations and carry an inherent risk of breaking something else - and that is the issue. It would be different if we had a full regression test suite across all the platforms and variations on platforms that our users are operating on - but we don't. We don't compare performance between releases or for any updates in our test suite so it isn't part of our scope for release readiness - if this is such a critical thing that must be fixed then it is something that we should be measuring and checking as a release condition - but we don't - because it actually isn't that critical. Tim.
