Extended Long Term Support for Wheezy
[ Bcc to ftpmasters, wanna-build team, DSA team, LTS team, security team
to catch their attention ]
Hello,
some of the LTS sponsors are looking to extend the support period of
Debian 7 Wheezy (from a few months up to a full year). Some of the LTS
sponsors (notably Plat'Home, Toshiba) are also members of the Civil
Infrastructure Project which wants to build an "open source base layer
(OSBL) for embedded systems" that would be supported for 15 years or more
("super long-term maintenance", SLTS in their jargon) and it looks like
that Debian is their reference distribution to build this:
https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/civilinfrastructureplatform/cip-core
I queried the current set of paid contributors and we have enough
volunteers (6) to actually make this "extended LTS" happen for one
supplementary year, at least from the "providing security updates" side.
The problem is that this extension would not work like the regular
LTS period. Due to the decreased interest for this extension, we would
only support the set of packages requested by the sponsors and the
sponsors will have to pay their (varying) share of the workload generated
by the packages they use.
Our question is whether this can be done on debian.org infrastructure.
All sponsors and CIP members would largely prefer if we could continue
to provide security updates through the usual debian.org channels. It's
also the best way to let everybody benefit from the work done within
this project. But it might be a bit misleading given that the rules would
have again changed.
So here are a few questions to the various teams:
- for ftpmasters, can we keep wheezy/updates on security.debian.org for
one year more? (it might be possible to archive wheezy and drop it from
the main mirror, that would be a clear sign to everybody that something
important changed, and we could reconfigure the buildd to use another
repository)
- for security team, can we continue to use the security tracker for
wheezy for one year more? (or even longer in the context of CIP)
- for buildd/DSA teams, can we keep wheezy buildds (only amd64/i386 has
been requested so far) for one year more?
- are there other problems related to this extended LTS that need to be
discussed?
I'm happy to answer any question that you might have.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
Support Debian LTS: https://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html
Learn to master Debian: https://debian-handbook.info/get/
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