Release methodology
Drupal 10’s initiatives and requirements were defined before Drupal 10 was launched. This was based on several factors.
Drupal 10 has a defined life cycle with roughly 6 months of minor releases. There is no explicit number of minor releases before a major release is announced. However, major releases, starting with Drupal 8, have been on an approximate 2-to-3-year cadence. After this cadence, a new major version is released and the previous major version reaches its end of life. The only exception is Drupal 7, which has extended end-of-life support. Details can be found on drupal.org by searching for Core Release Cycles.
Drupal applications inherit life cycle considerations of Drupal’s dependencies. Infrastructure, such as PHP and MySQL, have explicit supported versions at the time a major version is supported. As an example, Drupal would not explicitly support an end-of-life version of PHP. Application-level dependencies, such as Symfony components...