Re: Debian LTS?
On Fri, Oct 07, 2011 at 02:00:38PM +1100, Andrew McGlashan wrote:
> I would like to see all major release having support for 5 years.
> And yes, I do see the problems with that too. But the long term
> support can concentrate on bug fixes only (security and product
> functionality).
I'd like to point out that LTS doesn't necessarily mean that all 29K
packages in squeeze (and whatever the number will be in the next
stable) should be supported for 5 years, which would probably be an
unrealistic goal. I feel that Ubuntu's LTS model is a pretty
reasonable compromise: the Server release is supported for 5 years and
Desktop for 3.
Of course, they are just different package subsets of the same Ubuntu
distribution, and after some apt-get'ing you end up with a mixture of
packages with different support status, and I'm afraid that not all
sysadmins are aware of the fact, and are believing all the software
they have on their installed-from-LTS-CD server is good for five
years. (There is a utility "ubuntu-support-status" to check.)
Supporting most stable server oriented packages, and core GNU stuff,
shouldn't be that hard, and on the other hand, it's clearly almost
impossible - and at the same time pointless - to try to support rapid
release desktop software (think e.g. Firefox/Iceweasel) for five
years.
Naturally, one could argue that it should not even be Debian's mission
to provide LTS releases when there already are decent derivate distros
like Ubuntu for users who require LTS. But maybe there is also a
possibility of two-way co-operation with them? Just food for thought.
--
Henrik Ahlgren
Seestieto
Lars Sonckin kaari 10, FI-02600 Espoo
+358-50-3866200
Reply to: