On Sat, 7 Sep 2013, shirish शिरीष wrote:
Hi all, There is and was interesting discussion on having/making a Debian LTS kinda thing and I was in two minds whether to share it or not. While there has been some movement [1][2] there have also been concerns for the same [3] . Ultimately what pushed me to write about it is that the discussion got featured in lwn.net [4] . There is just so much stuff people can do only if we can motivate them for it.
1. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/08/msg00645.html 2. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/09/msg00098.html 3. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/09/msg00100.html 4. http://lwn.net/Articles/565007/#Comments
Hi Shirish,I've been following this discussion somewhat, and have also read the LWN article. I agree with Russ Allbery when he said it is very difficult to maintain software for longer than a two year lifespan, because after that (if not before) the upstreams lose interest. Actually, based on my experiences, I'm surprised that one can get most upstreams to cooperate at all with fixes to older software - my experience is that developers will only fix the current version and want you to stay updated to that if you want bug fixes. I think that without *substantial* inputs of money, such a scheme is not feasible. I'm pretty impressed that Debian can manage it for 3 years for stable, even if they don't do it perfectly.
Regards, Faheem Mitha