Re: Re: Meltdown fix for wheezy-backports
Ben, thanks for explaining the situation and for all your work on the
kernel for Debian. And thanks to all the other backporters and the
backport admins for their work over the years.
I wish to make the case for continuing backports into LTS releases, if
the backporter for particular packages is willing (as it sounds like Ben
is). In my opinion, this is especially important in the case of the
kernel. The backport admins might have actual data on this, but I
wouldn't be surprised if the kernel packages are by far the most popular
backport, even on a lot of systems the only backport.
These are the exact systems which either currently or might one day rely
on LTS. If backports and LTS are incompatible, then it really reduces
the utility of both of them, especially in the case of a
security-sensitive, frequently-needed-for-modern-hardware package like
the kernel.
It certainly makes sense that many backporters aren't willing to babysit
their packages all through the LTS phase of life. Might it be possible
to set up a (for example) "jessie-backports-lts" repository when Jessie
goes to LTS? That way the jessie-backports repo can go to the archive,
as Ben suggests, but users who still need backports can meet backporters
willing to continue via jessie-backports-lts.
I believe that this would be worth doing this even if the only software
in jessie-backports-lts were the kernel and associated packages. As I
said before, the kernel is uniquely and immensely useful both as a
backport and for LTS.
All this is easy for me to say because I have no idea how much effort it
would be, nor am I in a position to undertake it, so I'll of course
defer to the opinion of the administrators. There's definitely a use
case here. It would be really nice to find a solution.
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