## Context As part of https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-com/gl-infra/-/epics/971, Delivery opened up the maintained stable branches, so that maintainers can merge bug fixes and performance improvements to the current and last two releases. ([Announcement](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/delivery/-/issues/21474)) It served as a interim effort in order to decrease the engineering load of backport requests and increase engineering efficiency. The actual maintenance policy (https://docs.gitlab.com/policy/maintenance/#maintained-versions) does not align the bug fix policy with the security policy. While all the security fixes are supported for the maintained versions, not all bug fixes are. Due to the volume of bug fixes, we postponed the decision to align the two policies. Thus the maintenance policy for bug fixes continues to be suboptimal for the company's needs: 1. Devalue the customer experience. Important bug fix updates and critical quality improvements may not be delivered to customers running older versions, including GitLab Dedicated. 2. The policy is not aligned with the increased out-of-policy backport demand (FedRAMP) ### What we're changing and why This epic is to align the bug fix policy with the security one of the maintenance policy. This means that all applicable bug fixes should be supported across all currently maintained versions (n, n-1, n-2). This ensures that more users on previous versions receive all applicable critical quality improvements without needing to upgrade immediately. * 5% of SM ARR is on the current stable version of GitLab as of 2025-03-18. This means that 95% of customers do not benefit from bug fixes according to our policy. * Increasing the policy to n-2 will mean that 45% of SM ARR can benefit from these bug fixes. **This will improve quality for an order of magnitude more customers with relatively little effort**. * Dedicated customers, always on the n-1 release, will see increased value from this change. We will also enable engineers in order to reduce engineering effort and streamline the backporting workflow in this epic. ## Proposal Align the bug fix policy with the security one, while reducing engineering effort during backporting workflow. Impact: * Enrich the customer upgrade experience by providing all applicable bug fixes to the last three releases. * Removes the friction between the bug and security policy. * Removes overhead from engineering groups and release managers during backporting flow. ## Participants ## DRI ## Exit Criteria - [ ] [GitLab maintenance policy](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/policy/maintenance.html) for bug fixes is expanded to account for three releases - [ ] Bug fixes are backported to the maintained version - [ ] The number of backport requests to the maintained version decreases # Issue admin ``` /epic &1738 /label ~"workflow-infra::Triage" ~"group::release-and-deploy" ~"Delivery::P4" ~"maintenance policy extension" ~"release tooling" ```