those who yearn a LTS version why dont collaborate come together and maintian 1 specific version of UE? not like you dont have access to the source?
Anyone down to join?
in my personal case, i would need time, money, more health. and even though i’m quite experienced in cpp i don’t consider myself and expert in ue internals.
though one of the biggest issues for me is that maintaining a branch is quite the work, and lately epic breaks a ton of things on each new release, and introduces new issues.
i tried contributing fixes to their repo and the management is so bad to the point of being insulting, i just gave up. so i don’t think “we’ll backport the fixes and then send it to them” is a rational idea.
the other thing is how epic breaks stuff and creates new incompatible features as that it makes it very hard to backport fixes. since they might fix something, but the fix depends on a refactor.
and also usually epic only focuses on the latest release. once they put 5.6 out there, they don’t do any more 5.5.x versions. so they won’t be fixing old issues.
it’s possible, but it’s likely that we can’t simply backport 100% of the fixes.
so every time we target a new lts version, the best option is to start again from current and forward-port all the fixes. which is actually how things tend to work (for example is how debian works). but with the added issue of having to potentially re-apply and re-work fixes.
so for once it’s a considerable amount of work. i guess if we manage to gather a few volunteers we could pull it off.
but again what concerns me is that without epic’s official support we would be playing catching up games with a ton of overhead.
though, for how things are atm, a cynic person would argue it won’t take a ton of effort. and a stable lts sounds more valuable than 2 to 3 broken versions anyway.
in any case, looking at it from an optimistic pov, epic seems to react when there’s a critical mass.
and if we manage to start some movement, and people start to value the work, then epic could recognize that and facilitate in any way. (by streamlining contributions, providing us with an official branch where we can contribute, granting a megagrant which would not be a bad idea and if that happens count me in).
so i’d say we could try.