Re: UNS: Debian 4.0 Upgrade Path
Dear Michael,
Michael Gilbert wrote:
it already seems hard enough with the current level of manpower to
support two releases at the same time let alone three. it may be
doable, but the security team would need more volunteers (particularly
those interested in doing the work to keep oldstable supported).
I found this posting on testing-security-announce which seems to
indicate that security support for squeeze is not going to start soon:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-testing-security-announce/2010/01/msg00000.html
However if that is the case, I wonder if oldstable support could be
extended for some more time.
I know that all the work is done by volunteers and I'm very grateful for
what they do. Still I think that especially in the sector of
institutional use, the popularity of Debian could be improved by
offering longer support cycles. I don't think Debian should go as far
as Microsoft does (10 years of support for Windows 2000), but 5 years of
support in my opinion would be more suited to the typical upgrade [*]
cycles in large organisations. [**]
Cheers!
Thiemo
[*] I'm taking the user view on "upgrade" here. For the user, anything
that bumps up the version number is an upgrade, be it through "apt-get
dist-upgrade" or through re-installation (possibly skipping a release).
[**] Take CERN as an example for a large organisation. They deploy
customised RedHat distros after a lengthy certification process. This
is the list of certification dates of the past (taken from [***]):
11/2002 CERN Linux 7.3.1
11/2004 Scientific Linux 3
03/2006 Scientific Linux 4
01/2010 Scientific Linux 5
Thus their deployment cycle so far was 2 years, 4 years, 4 years. Add
to that the time certification takes, CERN might just fit into a 5 year
support life-span. I assume that there are many large organisations
which are as slow as that or only slightly faster.
[***] http://linux.web.cern.ch/linux/news.shtml
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| Dipl.-Phys. Thiemo Nagel | |
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