[1459] in athena10
Re: Dapper Support
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mitchell E Berger)
Tue Mar 10 00:05:25 2009
Message-Id: <200903100404.n2A44Ogr000142@byte-me.mit.edu>
To: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
cc: Evan Broder <broder@MIT.EDU>, Tim Abbott <tabbott@MIT.EDU>,
William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>, debathena@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 09 Mar 2009 18:50:44 EDT."
<F7D1BE84-B4B4-4B5F-8B3E-C600FF0871CB@mit.edu>
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:04:24 -0400
From: Mitchell E Berger <mitchb@MIT.EDU>
> On Mar 9, 2009, at 5:41 PM, Evan Broder wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> After offline clarification, I'm fine with this.
>
> However, I note that the 2.5 year date for Dapper was 1/1/09. I seem
> to recall hearing complaints before that date that it was getting hard
> to build/support Dapper packages already...
I agree that based on the fact that virtually nobody is using Dapper,
it's probably not a real issue to desupport it here. However, I'd
like to ask that we consider supporting Ubuntu LTS releases until the
Ubuntu end-of-life dates.
I've talked with Evan and understand that Dapper has been a nuisance.
But moving forward, I expect that a bunch of people are going to be
running Debathena servers on Ubuntu LTS releases, and a valid reason
to choose an LTS is the expectation that you'll be able to stick with
a stable distribution release for a long time. I think it would be
inconvenient to server maintainers if the Debathena half of their
system suddenly dropped support halfway through the supported lifetime
of the distribution they chose to run - it means that they don't get
to have Debathena along with the benefits of an LTS release, and may
well cause people to decide against Debathena.
Evan seems to think that there's been a far more drastic change between
Dapper and Hardy than there is likely to be between Hardy and Karmic+1,
and supporting through the Ubuntu EOL isn't a problem that's ever-increasing
in scope - there'll sometimes be two previous LTS releases out there,
and no more. To continue testing Debathena on the older LTS releases,
we can simply keep a couple VMs around. This does still leave the
nuisance of dealing with packages that require work to make them play
nicely with old distros, but I think the ability to let server admins
who choose LTS releases use Debathena without cutting their lifecycle
short might be worth it.
Mitch
