I am repeatedly saying i am happy with Elgg releasing new upgrades & i am also happy elgg is improving day by day but i am not happy with the method elgg team way of releasing upgrade. There should be a standardize version so that it will be easy for the developers to support as well easy for the end user to get support. 
To make things more clear Ura Soul plugin 2 have been broken already in 1.9 one is Related item the other is Container even after he upgraded the plugin to 1.9 it's still has some problems to be fixed but before the end user can ask for an fix elgg is already in 1.12 .. As i am also working as an developer for oracle framework i know how difficult it will be to maintain the plugin versions if elgg is not maintaining a standard version & keep releasing new elgg the developer will not be able to maintain the plugins.

1) A developer needs time to Improve his Plugin also (Elgg team need to consider this)

2) If elgg is not having a standard version & keep moving for new once the developer will be forced to fix the compatibility of the plugin alone so there will be no more feature added to the plugin.

3) The developer will not have time to introduce new plugins rather he will be running @ the back of his old plugins.

If the elgg team still consider that my point above are useless. I want them to see how many New plugins did elgg got in 1.9 & how many new plugins did elgg got in 1.8 check the facts & consider it for yourself. I am sure the developers where working hard to push all there waited plugins to 1.9, 1.10,1.11 & now for 1.12 they had no time for making a new one or adding features to the existing one.

If there is a Standard release & new release at least it can help in fixing the balance.
I am not saying we dont need new release what i am trying to say is

1) have a standard release Separately (Log Support release only security updates)

2) Have a New release Separately  

3) once the new release gets to a point of 10 combine them & release it as the next new Standard Release(LTS) it will make elgg mature in it's standard release.

I am always grateful for elgg team for the hard work they have been putting constantly to improve elgg. I built my elgg website with elgg 1.7.20 now my website is in 1.9.8 ..    

To date I've upgraded 4 sites from 1.8 -> current.  I'm in the midst of #5, and #6 is lined up.

I inherited a 1.8 custom site (#5) 3 days ago, and it's pretty much ready to pull the trigger on the jump to 1.9.  That includes a number of site-specific custom plugins that I've never seen before, plus a mix of existing community plugins and some older abandoned plugins that have been kept alive in this project.

Granted I have the benefit of working in Elgg as a day job whereas many of you are doing it as a side project, but I really feel the level of effort for this is being exaggerated.  The jump from 1.8 -> 1.9 isn't that dramatic with the exception of a few areas such as notifications.  Once a site is on 1.9 the jump to 1.12 is pretty much an hour long job...

the question of the amount of coding needed to go from 1.8 to 1.12 depends on how many plugins are being used, how many are self coded and what other changes may have occurred to other software layers too. in my case i used over 100 plugins on my 1.8 site and it took me a while just to research the upgrade status of each one, whether they were needed in my 1.12 site and so on. from there i needed to upgrade my own code and test my code against all the new plugins i was also testing. that's a lot of coding and testing for me. i have maybe 5-6 released plugins and 2-3 unreleased ones of my own - so not many compared to some other coders, but even so that was a lot to do in total. (partially this was due to me creating video streaming code and other wide reaching plugins that affect many aspects...)
i'm not so much complaining as i am just pointing to how it is a steep curve to regularly be asked to return to code to upgrade it. ideally that would be fine, but the reality is i don't have time available to do that regularly, so i just dedicate a large amount of time to it when i can.

as far as the many versions of my plugins are concerned, i am only supporting the latest versions (1.12) as maintaining multiple versions is just way too much overhead for me.

elgg is not maintaining a standard version & keep releasing new elgg the developer will not be able to maintain the plugins.

I'm very sorry but I still don't get it. Are you just asking us to stop changing the version number so fast? How would that benefit anyone?

2 have been broken already in 1.9

1.9 contained breaking changes. We stopped doing that in minor releases. 1.10-1.12 contain 0 breaking changes. There is literally nothing to do to get a 1.9-compatible plugin ready for 1.12. Nothing! It doesn't get any easier than that!

the developer will be forced to fix the compatibility of the plugin

There are no compatibility problems to fix after 1.9 (until 2.0). If this isn't true, please let us know specifically what problem you ran into so we can fix it.

Defining a LTS release policy could be useful, I suppose. I'd nominate the last minor release in every major branch. Only bugfixes when next major version is released. Only security fixes when following major version is released. Support dropped after that.

So 1.12 would get bugfixes until 3.0 is released, and security fixes until 4.0 is released.

That seems pretty long term to me. How would folks feel about that?

That seems fine to me.

I will admit there are a few plugins I've seen that break from 1.9 - 1.12, but in all cases they are using private API

@Evan Winslow: Thanks for explaining each & everything & Its fine for me the LTS policy you have defined.

Yeah, the last minor version as the LTS sounds good to me.

Yeah that's fine.

Announcement-worthy?

This means we also need to support 1.8 until 2.0 is final?