Long-Term Support (LTS) Branches

By Tom Manshreck, Abseil Tech Writer

Abseil encourages developers to “live at head” but we understand that philosophy may not work for everyone. We are therefore providing snapshots of the Abseil codebase. These snapshots are available as “Long Term Support” (LTS) branches of Abseil, and we intend to provide a new snapshot every 6 months or so.

We pledge to support these LTS snapshots for at least 2 years. If critical bug fixes, such as security issues, require us to change Abseil, we will also change them within any supported LTS snapshot.

NOTE: we don’t want you to think of these snapshots as “versions.” They are simply a snapshot of the codebase at a specific point in time. If you cannot build from source or otherwise live at head, prefer to use the latest LTS branch of Abseil instead.

For more information, consult Abseil’s Release Management guide.