[1476] in athena10
Re: Dapper Support
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tim Abbott)
Tue Mar 10 12:48:50 2009
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:47:48 -0400 (EDT)
From: Tim Abbott <tabbott@MIT.EDU>
To: Mitchell E Berger <mitchb@mit.edu>
cc: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@mit.edu>, Evan Broder <broder@mit.edu>,
William Cattey <wdc@mit.edu>, debathena@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <200903100404.n2A44Ogr000142@byte-me.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.10.0903101003490.6733@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
It is true that there were many more features added to Debian that made
Debathena customizations easier to implement between sarge and etch than
between etch and lenny.
That said, there will continue to be opportunities to improve things, and
I think it would be unwise to agree to support Hardy (which will never
appear in clusters or as a dialup) until it EOLs on the server 5 years
from now. I'd recommend making the commitment to do 2.5 or 3 years now,
and if we decide that it is easy to do so at the time we would normally
desupport hardy, we can consider extending to the full 5 years.
-Tim Abbott
On Tue, 10 Mar 2009, Mitchell E Berger wrote:
> 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.
