Ruby On Rails 4.2 End of Life
It looks like the answer to the Rails 4.2 EOL question has already been answered at http://rubyonrails.org/maintenance/ . The key points are:
- "New features are only added to the master branch and will not be available in fix releases."
- "Only the latest releases in the series will receive bug fixes."
- "For major security issues in the current series of releases, the next latest and last additional series will receive fixes and new versions."
- "For minor security issues, the current release series and the next latest will receive fixes and new versions."
Also, specifically for Rails 4.2, the release notes for Rails 5.1.0.rc1 indicate that Rails 4.2 will receive only major security fixes, otherwise Rails 4.x is not supported.
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There is no official end-of-life date for Rails 4.2 yet, but Rails policy has generally supported the current and previous major releases (currently 5 and 4, although support for 4.1 and below has already been dropped). So 4.2 is likely to be supported until Rails 6 is released. No one can say when it might be, but typical Rails versions are released 2 or 3 years apart, so it would be a pretty safe bet at the end of 2018 ...
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The end is near! Rails 6.0.0.rc1 was released on April 24, 2019. (Now, Rails 6.0.0.rc2 on July 30th). When the 6.0.0 final arrives in "a few weeks", it will mark the end of the lifecycle for Rails 4 Support. Expect this in September 2019. (I'll update this answer when it comes up,) Stay tuned at https://weblog.rubyonrails.org/releases/
If you haven't started upgrading your existing Rails 4 applications to Rails 5 yet, it's time to get started. The good news is that this major update looks simpler than previous major updates.
Here's a quick overview: https://www.ombulabs.com/blog/rails/upgrades/upgrade-rails-from-4-2-to-5-0.html
Here is the official update document, with more details: https://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/upgrading_ruby_on_rails.html#upgrading-from-rails-4-2-to-rails-5-0
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