[Feat]: Document 5.x branch support lifecycle

[greggles]

Feature Request Is New

• I have verified that the requested feature does not already exist or has not already been requested.

Description of the feature

Hello,

I've read the upgrade guide to learn about migrating to the 6.x releases. Thanks for providing that.

To help plan our workload in moving from 5.x to 6.x I wonder if you have an estimate of much longer 5.x will be supported. In our environment the features of 6.x are not necessary, so we will likely only upgrade when it reaches end of life OR when we have to do some work on the integration anyway (e.g. to add some new feature to our shipping process).

Asking as a "feature" as one outcome could be to document this timeline in the upgrade guide, but if this is better asked/answered somewhere else please just let me know.

Thanks! 🙌

[nwithan8]

Hey @greggles , thanks for reaching out!

Moving forward, any new features will only be added to v6.

v5 will only receive critical updates such as bug fixes as needed.

That said, v5 should continue to work for you as long as it is compatible with your tech stack and PHP version. There were no changes to the API itself included in the v5 -> v6 upgrade, so all the v5 features will continue to work for now.

There are planned changes to the API in the future that will eventually break the v5 implementation, at which point you will need to upgrade to a newer version for the client library to work as expected. We'll be sure to make you and everyone aware when those changes are approaching.

Thanks for using EasyPost!

[greggles]

Thanks for your insight and feedback. That makes sense and sounds good to me. For what it's worth, having a year of advanced notice of EOL would be our ideal scenario.