Damn Django is pretty hard at sunsetting old versions. If they are going to release a new one in October and only supply security upgrades to things that are two versions behind, does that means you have to upgrade your system in less than a year?
And Django 1.4 was released on the 23rd of March 2012, so if you stick with the LTS releases you very rarely have to upgrade. I have to say though, I wouldn't want to upgrade a 1.4 app to 1.8 - lots of big changes have happened between those two releases.
The reason for the LTS versions is in large part for enterprises that are stuck on older versions of Python because of RedHat support contracts and the like.
Django can move ahead and drop support for (honestly very outdated) Python versions like 2.5 and 2.6 so that newer Django releases can take advantage of additional features and nicer syntax in newer Python versions.
And companies stuck on python 2.6 because that's what's bundled in whatever version of RHEL can still get security patches to Django.
It's unreasonable to expect the (volunteer) django maintainers to indefinitely support every version of python or every version of Django.
And if you have no choice of upgrading to Django 1.5 yet, I'm sure you'd rather continue to get security patches until you can upgrade to 1.8.
Agree. The LTS releases are great, but for anything you expect to be working with on an ongoing basis I think it's worth the yearly pain of upgrading rather than a huge headache every three years.
It is just that I imagine most IT projects have a timespan in decades so ideally you want something like Java that can still run your old stuff and where upgrading means putting out a new runtime.
