kkofler added a comment.
LTS distros can upgrade software to new releases. RHEL regularly does this for some components, such as GNOME, lately even Qt (Qt 5 was upgraded from 5.6 LTS to 5.9 LTS in RHEL 7, I'd hope they'll do 5.12 LTS too at some point, though with RHEL 8 having been released, they might also stop upgrading RHEL 7 that way, so I don't know). What components they do that with is purely a policy decision. RHEL has never been upgrading the KDE project's software that way, but that's because they always considered it something they have to but don't actually want to maintain. Now they kicked it out entirely, so it will be maintained by the community in EPEL, hopefully in a more useful way. (That said, you can't really just upgrade a distribution that shipped with Plasma 4 to Plasma 5, so RHEL 7 would have been stuck either way. It would make sense to make the last release series of a first-digit major version an LTS. Similarly, upgrading KDE Applications as a whole was also problematic in the transition period where every release branch would port more applications from kdelibs 4 to KF5, even the upgrade-friendly Fedora only did partial upgrades of KDE Applications in stable releases during that period.) TASK DETAIL https://phabricator.kde.org/T10812 To: ngraham, kkofler Cc: kkofler, rahulch, lydia, adrianchavesfernandez, aspotashev, apol, jriddell, xyquadrat, jtamate, vkrause, lbeltrame, ltoscano, cfeck, aacid, #yakuake, #okular, #dolphin, #kate, #spectacle, #konsole, #gwenview, #kde_pim, #kde_games, #kde_applications, ngraham
