[1496] in athena10
Re: Dapper Support
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mitchell E Berger)
Tue Mar 10 18:29:24 2009
Message-Id: <200903102228.n2AMSN2T012087@byte-me.mit.edu>
To: Tim Abbott <tabbott@MIT.EDU>
cc: Mitchell E Berger <mitchb@MIT.EDU>, Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>,
Evan Broder <broder@MIT.EDU>, William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>,
debathena@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:47:48 EDT."
<alpine.DEB.1.10.0903101003490.6733@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:28:23 -0400
From: Mitchell E Berger <mitchb@MIT.EDU>
This seems perhaps reasonable given that Hardy won't hit clusters. However,
people are already using it as a Debathena server platform, and when
we go public in the clusters this summer, we'll still be the better
part of a year away from Karmic+1 (the next LTS version) being released,
so I expect that some people setting up servers may still be choosing
Hardy at that point, and I hope we'll find it easy enough to continue
supporting when the time comes).
I think it's more important, though, that we consider supporting any
LTS that comes out once we've gone public for the same period as Ubuntu
supports it.
Mitch
> 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-increasin
> g
> > 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.
>
>
