As announced in the "Bits from the Security Team" (LWN copy) email a couple of weeks ago, it is possible that Debian squeeze will have Long Term Support, primarily in the way of security updates.
The news have made it to Softpedia and reddit and even though it has not been announced how long it would be supported, what use cases are planned, etc., the answer I can give is that it depends solely on people contributing to it.
I'd like to add that no, the LTS announcement is not related to the use of Debian on the ISS laptops, as mentioned in reddit - at least not that we are aware of. And to avoid possible confusion from the Softpedia article, the plan is LTS for the squeeze release.
From the emails we have received in response to the announcement, I do wonder however where are the people who expressed interest and signs of engagement last time there was a discussion about providing LTS for Debian.
Perhaps it wasn't stressed enough in the email, but those who are interested in benefiting from (and therefore contributing to) long term support, please do contact the security team NOW.
After all, the clock keeps ticking and Debian squeeze is going to reach its End of Life in less than two months otherwise.
Thanks for your informative post.
ReplyDeleteI hope you don't mind that I've linked and partially quoted it in a post to the debian-user mailing list.
Meh, I wish this had been done for lenny. We don’t use squeeze, at all.
ReplyDeleteThat is good idea, particularly for people who use older hardware. (It is not expected that Linux world behaves as Micro$oft, and asks for newer hardware for any OS iteration.)
ReplyDeleteWhatever happens, I'd keep 'Squeeze LTS' for at least a couple of years more, if for nothing else but for keeping the old hardware playing as a firewall/router for the rest of the home LAN. I checked the difference in between Squeeze and Wheezy HW requirements and it seems that Wheezy asks for some more RAM. And one of my old machines has only 224 MB of RAM with Celeron 400 MHz CPU. That old box runs 6.0.9 now and I am not sure if it would accept an upgrade to 7.0.4 - not to mention that its HDD also does not have too much free space ...
ReplyDeleteHowever, if Squeeze is going to be officially abandoned soon, I'd search for some alternatives ...