Debian “LTS” rant
Tuesday, 4 June 2019
- Date
- 2019-06-04
- category
Blog
- slug
debian-lts-rant
- summary
Just some late complaining about a recent Debian change
Debian has extended support for some of their recent releases for people that are slow to upgrade. As of the time of this writing, Debian Jessie is considered LTS1. The concept of LTS on Debian is relatively new, with Jessie only being the third release to be considered as one, after Wheezy and Squeeze.
Supported must have a special meaning to Debian, because in March 2019, the
people in charge of the FTP repository for Debian decided to remove
jessie-updates and jessie-backports from the mirrors, causing existing
Jessie installs to get errors when trying to update to fix any pending security
issues that have been patched. The reasoning for this was that
jessie-updates and jessie-backports were no longer getting updates and
were already copied in the archive.debian.org repository, and only the security
repository . jessie-updates is a bit of a strange case, it seems to have to
do with the point releases (8.10, 8.11) of Debian, and once those are released
anything from jessie-updates gets merged into the standard jessie
repository.
jessie-backports is a bit more complicated, since although the repository is
archived on archive.debian.org, it expired a while ago and won’t work unless you
globally disable the validity checks for “valid-until” for all repositories.
Hopefully by the time Debian Stretch goes “LTS” I will no longer have any old systems running on it so I don’t have to do a bunch of maintenance on an operating system that is advertised as still being supported. I would rather be supported or not, instead of being in this gray area that Debian insists on.
- 1
Long-term support