Re: proposal: changes to bullseye-backports publication on azure
On Sun, Nov 23, 2025 at 01:57:26PM +0100, Bastian Blank wrote:
> > 1. We maintain the 11-backports plan with only amd64 SKUs in the future.
> > This lets us leave the current amd64 SKUs unchanged so amd64 users do
> > not need to take any action.
> >
> > 2. We introduce a new plan 11-backports-arm64-v2 that will contain
> > only newly published arm64 images using a sku with the same name.
> > Arm64 users will need to specify the new SKU when launching VMs. (Feel
> > free to suggest a better name for the new plan/sku.)
>
> 3. We deprecate 11-backports now, just eight months before it being EOL
> anyway.
>
> I don't see a reason to do a pretty large rename dance just for a soon
> to be EOL distribution. We can do it for all and implement some
> changes, like no gen 1 anymore.
Deprecating it now is definitely an option, but it shouldn't be our
preferred option. Eight months is quite a long time; there may be some
users who are just beginning their migration to bookworm or trixie.
Part of the appeal of Debian for production workloads is that we don't
arbitrarily break things, and I think deprecating a release eight months
before its official EOL date would be a pretty poor experience for our
users.
If we didn't have a reasonable path forward, then maybe I could be
convinced, but in this case we have an less impactful option.
(Don't get me wrong; I look forward to the day when we can stop building
bullseye altogether.)
noah
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