The OpenLDAP installation that reported the most significant defects fixed in 2.6.2 has confirmed that the test builds correct the problems. This is great news. Anyone else out there using these testing builds should let the Project know how it is going.
The OpenLDAP Project and Symas take defect fixes seriously. We know that most OpenLDAP users are on software releases with tens to hundreds of defects. Security bugs (CVEs). Crashing bugs they just haven't hit YET. Unfortunately, many of the problems reported by our Support clients were already fixed in readily available prior releases. By failing to update on a reasonable schedule, they volunteered.
Deferred maintenance, in hardware or software, is temporary. Eventually, a significant upgrade will be required and too many system elements will have to change all at once. More incremental maintenance is relatively inexpensive. When bigger platform changes come along, the maintenance of subsystems and other maintained applications will not be a source of complexity and cost.
The Project's commitment to a Long Term Support (LTS) Release offers something between full maintenance updates and no updates. Crashing defects and security bugs (CVEs) are fixed with LTS updates. More sophiisticated changes are deferred to an update to the next LTS release. They and we hope that will lead to more frequent updates for all.