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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-security-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20111007051846.GE24569@lucky