Bug#727708: systemd jessie -> jessie+1 upgrade problems

[Kurt Roeckx <kurt@roeckx.be>]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 09:38:56PM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 10:29:35AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de> writes:
> > 
> > > this hits exactly the core of the problem:
> > 
> > > The minimum supported Linux kernel version in glibc is currently 2.6.16,
> > > released in 2006. And I'd trust glibc upstreamt that this requirement
> > > won't suddenly be bumped to a quite recent version.
> > 
> > > Is there any explicit commitment from systemd upstream that releases of 
> > > systemd releases around 2017 will still contain fallback code to work
> > > on kernels from 2013/2014?
> > 
> > I'd really like to keep this bug and this discussion focused on what's
> > relevant to Debian as a project, so let's put this in that perspective.
> > The oldest kernel that Debian supports is 2.6.32, released in 2009.  But
> > the oldest kernel that we support for upgrades, which is the only point at
> > which systemd backward compatibility matters for Debian's support model,
> > is 3.2.0, released in 2012.
> 
> Nitpick:
> 3.2.0 was released on January 5th 2012, so nearly 2011

And that is why it's up to 3 years.

We release about every 2 years, but the kernel we have in wheezy
was already about 16 months old when wheezy was released.  Jessie
will freeze in november 2014, so that the kernel will then be about
3 years old.  I'm going to assume that the release team is not
going to accept new systemd versions from that point on, so
systemd should only support a kernel that's 3 years old.


Kurt