Re: Re: Meltdown fix for wheezy-backports
On Mon, 22 Jan 2018 at 21:54:49 -0600, Xan Charbonnet wrote:
> I wish to make the case for continuing backports into LTS releases
I'm finding it hard to reconcile the factors involved here:
* sufficiently change-averse to be unwilling to upgrade to Debian 9
after the non-LTS support lifetime of Debian 8 has expired,
approximately 1 year after the release of Debian 9 (or since you
were initially talking about wheezy-backports, the same thing for
Debian 8 and Debian 7);
* but sufficiently tolerant of regressions to be willing to upgrade
individual packages to versions that have not had anywere near
the same amount of testing as an integrated system as what's in
any single stable release
I'd consider stable + backports to be a middle ground between stable
and testing, for people who are willing to tolerate some regression
risk in exchange for newer packages, but not as much regression risk
as if they were running testing or unstable. It's harder to see what the
niche in the ecosystem is for oldstable-LTS + backports - if you want
newer software than oldstable, stable is right there, with direct security
support from package maintainers and the security team.
> 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.
The kernel is relatively self-contained, so if the kernel and maybe some
firmware are a special case, perhaps installing the stable kernel on
an otherwise oldstable system would be a viable option that would not
require someone to maintain a separate kernel backport?
smcv
Reply to: