I’d love to have us have some sort of LTS channel at some point.
However, as this thread talks about, “LTS” means different things to different people. I think it’s really important that LTS is about artifacts. This makes it completely distinct from editions. Now, there may be some value into making sure that the release cycles make sense, but that’s more of a strategic issue than what the LTS is fundamentally about. Remember also that new features can often land in older editions as well, and that new features will continue to land in Rust 2018 in the future; so saying that we will freeze “based on an edition” is a bit non-sensical, IMO.
What I’d like to see is an LTS model where it’s another train; just like not every nightly becomes a beta, not every stable will become an LTS. At first, the LTS release cycle would be fairly short; over time, we lengthen it. LTS also means backporting security issues, and not general bugfixes. Again, possibly moving to more in the future, maybe.
This also does apply a reasonable anchor for the ecosystem as well.