In an announcement[1] from 2009, Debian promised to support Lenny at least until the release of Wheezy:
"To accommodate the needs of larger organisations and other users with a long upgrade process, the Debian project commits to provide the possibility to skip the upcoming release and do a skip-upgrade straight from Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 ("Lenny") to Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 (not yet codenamed)." Now Debian announces[2] that it stops security support for Lenny. We are a mid-sized University subnet, with Debian Lenny on almost every computer. That's about 150 workstations and a couple of dozens of servers, both user-accessible and infrastructure. It generally takes us two or three months to implement, test, and deploy a release upgrade. We have lots of stuff that requires special attention when moving to a new release, like auto installer, configuration management system, 7GB of locally managed software in /usr/local/, etc. On top of that, we usually do distribution upgrades in the summer, between the terms, because we have students and instructors relying on our systems almost year round. We chose not to upgrade from Lenny last summer, for various reasons, knowing that we should be safe because there should still be support for Lenny at least all the way until Wheezy. Debian dropping support to Lenny so unexpectedly is an enormous problem for our organization. This means that we need to live without security updates in the time being, drop all of our other projects on the floor, and start working on upgrading to Squeeze between the Winter and the Summer terms. On top of that, we will be upgrading to Squeeze for only a year, because it is likely that Wheezy will be out by this time next year, so we'll have to spend a couple of months next year as well on another release upgrade. We are quite surprised by and upset with Debian deciding to terminate support for Lenny. We know that there are other networks at our university affected by the latest announcement just the same way we are. I am sure that there must be other organisations out there who are stuck in the same situation. I wonder what it would take to make Debian reconsider their decision with regards to termination of Lenny support, and stick with the promise from 2009. [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/2009/msg00009.html [2] http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120209 -- Arcady Genkin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/cak7ktt8ofpcl1l1a5feynpdtz1y-l6vuu5gkvf3wti_i0j0...@mail.gmail.com