[2049] in athena10
LTS support policy
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Evan Broder)
Sat Apr 4 20:24:27 2009
Message-ID: <49D7FA1D.5010501@mit.edu>
Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:23:57 -0400
From: Evan Broder <broder@MIT.EDU>
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To: Debathena <debathena@mit.edu>
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I want to bring this up again, because we should at the very release
send a Gutsy EOL reminder e-mail announcement soon, and I'd like to
declare a Debathena Dapper EOL date when we do that.
I still think that 2.5 years was the right time period to stop caring
about Dapper. I don't know if that's going to hold for Hardy yet, but I
am starting to feel like software is leaving Hardy behind, moreso than I
was the last time we discussed this.
Let's start by looking at Dapper, because hopefully that can guide how
we generalize the decision. I looked through our apt repo access logs
for who accessed the Dapper sections of the apt repository. There are 6
IP addresses total. 3 of these are lunatique (nelhage), geminorum
(geofft), and balanced-tree (andersk). Of the other three,
- (a) looks like it's been upgraded to Hardy,
- (b) is a DHCP address in the same building as (a), so I bet it was
(a) before (a) was (a)
- (c) is a deleted hostname, and the IP address hasn't accessed the
repo since 8/28/08
If I filter out hostnames that I know (i.e. of people who almost
certainly aren't running Dapper), the last access from anyone to the
Dapper repo was 9/3/08.
Normally I would say that it seems poor to desupport Dapper on <2 weeks
notice, but since nobody's using it, I don't think I actually care. I
propose desupporting Dapper on April 18, at the same time as Gutsy.
Generalizing that to a general LTS policy, I'd suggest that we declare
that we will support LTS releases for no less than 2 years, and so long
as there is continued use, we will support them for up to 3 years.
However, after the next LTS release comes out, we reserve the right to
terminate support on limited notice if we determine that an LTS release
is literally unused.
I'd like to hear ACKs on this from other people, especially SIPB
Debathena people.
- Evan
