On 01/23/2018 12:06 PM, Alexander Wirt wrote:
The lts guys can do whatever they want, but not inside the backports team. We discussed that on the list and the interest on continuing lts support was nearly zero. Which doesn't justify running a whole suite.
That's a perfectly fair position to take, but it means that backports may as well not exist for anybody who can't guarantee that they'll move off of a Debian version within a year of the next version's release.
Anybody who can't guarantee that has to avoid backports completely, at least for security-sensitive packages like the kernel. Which is a shame because the kernel backport is singularly so useful.
The openssh packages are also a good example: anybody who can't guarantee that they'll upgrade that quickly has to stick with the default openssh rather than installing the backport, which supports (among other goodness) more secure ciphers. So they have to stick with the less secure ciphers of the older version.