[1447] in athena10
Re: Dapper Support
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Evan Broder)
Mon Mar 9 17:42:19 2009
Message-ID: <49B58CFB.2040302@mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:41:15 -0400
From: Evan Broder <broder@MIT.EDU>
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@mit.edu>
CC: Tim Abbott <tabbott@mit.edu>, William Cattey <wdc@mit.edu>,
debathena@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <6EB2241D-265F-4AF9-92A1-2AB0B372E958@mit.edu>
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Jonathan Reed wrote:
>> We may want to at the same time announce our intentions regarding how
>> long
>> we'll support the hardy LTS release.
>
> I think the last time we discussed this, the idea was that we would
> treat LTS releases the same as regular Ubuntu releases - that is, we
> would declare their EOL** date to be ~18 months from their release
> date. Is this still the plan?
Hmm...I'd like it to be a supported operation to just run Debathena on
LTS releases. Why don't we shoot to support LTS releases for 2.5 years -
giving people 6 months to upgrade from one LTS to the next? SIPB will
probably supporting a Debian release for at least that long anyway.
> If there is a large enough user community using Debathena on servers
> (where they would want to take advantage of LTS), we may want to
> consider supporting some subset of packages for LTS users, but that's
> presumably a ways down the road, and I don't know that we want to
> commit ourselves to that yet.
>
> -Jon
>
> **EOL is tentatively defined as "the date after which we cannot
> guarantee support, bugfixes, or security fixes for Debathena packages,
> but we might choose to continue to provide support and updates if it's
> not too much effort"
There's really a point of no return for desupporting a release. Because
of how our infrastructure works, at a given point in time, packages
either are built for a particular release, or they aren't.
The one way we can hedge is whether we remove the packages from our apt
repo or not. When we desupported sarge, edgy, and feisty, we waited a
while before removing the old packages from the apt repository (I
finally removed them when I realized that those packages weren't patched
by our security release over the summer).
When we're desupporting a release at the same time as Ubuntu, the call
is easier. Ubuntu removes releases from their repository when they're
desupported, making it kind of pointless for us to keep ours up. When
we're not desupporting in sync with Ubuntu, it's a little less clear.
I think that I'd be in favor of removing packages for releases when we
desupport them, assuming that we announce the EOL sufficiently in advance.
- Evan
