Re: Bits from the Security Team
On 10/03/14 15:44, Matthias Urlichs wrote:
> However, "LTS" releases should support upgrades from one LTS to the
> next. That's kindof what I'd expect, and Ubuntu certainly shows
> that it's possible.
I think LTS is being used to mean two different things here. Debian
releases are already more like Ubuntu LTS than Ubuntu non-LTS, and
Debian doesn't really have an equivalent of Ubuntu non-LTS releases.
Upgrading between 6-monthly Ubuntu releases is presumably rather
easier to support, since there's only 6 months' development churn to
deal with. Similarly, Ubuntu supporting an upgrade from old-LTS to
current-LTS is a lot like Debian supporting an upgrade from oldstable
to stable - either way it's a matter of about 2 years' development.
If people want to support oldstable for more than (1 release cycle + 1
year) but still disallow skipping releases, then the upgrade is still
feasible - it still pulls in about two years' worth of development,
and the only difference is that those two years were longer ago.
On the other hand, going directly from oldoldstable to stable pulls in
4 years of changes, and I think that's likely to result in having to
keep too many workarounds and too much cruft for too long, and having
to hold back progress for too long. For instance, wanting to be able
to do the upgrade from oldstable to stable using oldstable's apt and
dpkg means it already takes us 2 years to deploy an archive-wide
feature like dpkg multiarch - I wouldn't want it to take 4.
Does Ubuntu support upgrading directly from old-old-LTS to
current-LTS, e.g. from hardy to precise or from lucid to trusty?
Ubuntu's Wikipedia page doesn't seem to think so. A direct upgrade
from squeeze to jessie would be of a similar magnitude.
(With upstream hat on, my co-maintainers already think I'm going a bit
far by doing security releases for 2 year old D-Bus and Telepathy code
to support Debian stable, and I don't intend to extend that to a
longer-lived oldstable.)
S
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