Just to emphasize a point that might get lost, I think Discourse does great here. One improvement would be to at least highlight the topics you’ve already written that describe changes and potential breakage within that upgrade cycle. For example, with the 3.5 release, I had to open the release notes, click through to the blog, and then happen to click on the link about bundling plugins with Discourse core in order to catch that detail that leaving those plugins within my config file could impact upgrades.
It’d be great to pull those kinds of notes out onto a page/topic for ESR releases, even if it’s just a set of links to existing topics that should be reviewed prior to performing an ESR upgrade.
This may be beyond the scope of this thread though - my feedback on the versioning change is that I welcome it and appreciate the transparency here. I think this would be a great improvement that would simplify things while giving us more options for self-hosting.
Thank you!