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Wasn't it already known that 0.4.8 will reach EOL this month?
Tor 0.4.8 reached End of Life on the 1st of June, and there will not be any more updates to this release series. We highly encourage people to upgrade to the Tor 0.4.9 series (or later).
EOL is a product (software) lifecycle phase, which has nothing to do with choices made towards protocol features; that is a separate thing. What you do is you plan your protocol features, and then you align that into your product lifecycle, not the other way around. What is happening here is that they make a breaking protocol feature deprecation decision 21 days after the last software supporting it went EOL. And that is poor decision making.
I don't mind them stopping to maintain the specific software version, that's not the issue. And them putting effort in doing a maintenance release with a useful life of 4 months is also not a huge problem besides time wasted (I truly hate my review time being wasted by poor decision making, but in this case it didn't affect me.)
What I do mind is killing protocol features because they don't want to maintain it:
.. the Network Team has identified a couple of features we would like to remove from the Tor ecosystem. Removing support for 0.4.8 will help us facilitate a smooth transition, and reduce effort associated with difficult to maintain features that provide very little value. Unfortunately, because Tor’s Directory Protocol layer works the way it does, we cannot remove these features without affecting older clients.
But, there is not just good, but GREAT news: BIP-110 Rule 3 will make this applicable to Bitcoin too. Make Users Slaves Again #MUSA!
Very poor (lazy) decision making on their part. "We don't like deprecating older versions" -> Deprecates a 1.5-month old release. Ugh. Nice fast reaction speed on your end though!
This was on my wishlist for a while. Awesome!