Re: what to do with LTS-backports?
On 20 May 2016 at 15:14, Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, 2016-05-19 at 11:45 +0000, Holger Levsen wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> appearantly some maintainers don't want to support backports in
>> wheezy-backports anymore, saying wheezy is oldstable now (und
>> unsupported by Debian proper, "just" maintained by the Debian LTS team.)
>>
>> OTOH, having unsupported backports with known security vulnerabilities
>> is bad. So an option would be to _close_ wheezy-backports _now_, also to
>> communicate this issue to the users.
>
> What does 'close' mean? To remove the suite? That would be a very
> blunt way to communicate with our users, and a disservice to those who
> are happily using backports that are kept up to date (or haven't needed
> updates).
>
> It is a good reason to think again about we present the support status
> of backports and other suites to our users. Should they be expected to
> monitor a particular list? Install a package? Should APT support some
> kind of metadata indicating packages that are now unsupported?
>
>> Removing individual backports from wheezy-bpo is both error prone and
>> manual busy work on the shoulders of the bpo admins, who wouldn't want
>> to do this job.
>>
>> Alternativly, the backports maintainers would need to agree to maintain
>> those backports for two more years.
>>
>> What do you think?
>
> I think this question has to be answered by each maintainer
> independently. But I realise that it would take a fair amount of work
> for the backports administrators to process the answers, even if it's
> only one time every 2 years.
Is there some way to a) notify the maintainers their backports are
outdated [1]. b) script a mass update/rebuild that nags users with
NEWS files for the affected backports [1]?
[1] Using something like http://backports.debian.org/wheezy-backports/outdated/
Cheers,
Nicholas
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