Hi Andy,
My question would be - what is your aim in putting the EOL date on
that page? You're not (presumably) implying any level of support at
bitfolk with regards to those dates? Or perhaps you should be - if I
want to pay for Ubuntu extended support, I'd hope you wouldn't make
changes that would prevent me running ye olde Ubuntu at bitfolk.
I think it's easy to assume that Debian is in a better position than
Ubuntu because it supports the whole archive, but in practice surely
it is still driven by the maintainer to some degree and hence can vary
from package to package. For popular packages I'm sure things will get
fixed, but for smaller, less well known packages I just think issues
are more likely to pass them by.
Regards,
Roger
On Thu, 28 Jan 2021 at 16:47, Andy Smith <andy@???> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> On:
>
> https://bitfolk.com/techspec.html#toc_2_Available_Linux_distributions
>
> I am listing Ubuntu EOL dates as found at:
>
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases
>
> However, it seems that the EOL dates from the Ubuntu wiki refer to
> Extended Security Maintenance:
>
> https://ubuntu.com/security/esm
>
> If I understand things correctly, this:
>
> - covers only a small subset of the archive
> - requires an Ubuntu Advantage account
> - entitlement to ESM updates is only available for free for
> personal use on up to 3 machines
>
> So, for example, the recent "sudo" security issue is not available
> for 14.04 LTS users unless they meet the above requirements.
>
> If I have misunderstood things can someone correct me?
>
> If not, I don't think it is particularly clear of us to list those
> EOL dates on BitFolk's page and instead we should list the "End of
> Standard Support" ones.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> And if we do list "End of Standard Support" dates, should that be
> matched with "end of stable support" dates for Debian? The situation
> for Debian is not straightforward either:
>
> https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases#Production_Releases
>
> While LTS and ELTS are available free to everyone (BitFolk is one of
> monetary sponsors that makes that possible), they do only cover a
> subset of what was in Debian stable.
>
> A summary of what each thing means for Debian is something like:
>
> Stable Security:
>
> - Supported until release end of life
> - Package maintainers and security team are supposed to provide
> security fixes for every package in the stable release
> - buster EOL: some time in 2022
>
> Long Term Support:
>
> - Dedicated team of paid developers provide security fixes on a
> best effort basis; sometimes package maintainers help.
> - Known to only cover a subset of the archive; most important
> packages do get updates.
> - buster LTS EOL: likely some time in 2024
>
> Extended LTS:
>
> - Even smaller team of paid developers provide security fixes
> - buster ELTS EOL: likely some time in 2026
>
> Which is these things is fair to call a supported Debian release?
> Really I'd just like to keep some consistency.
>
> (Personal controversial interjection: I'm no CentOS fan but this is
> exactly what people will miss about CentOS. It was a straightforward
> 10 year support commitment. Which was a massive commitment. It
> wasn't always timely, but you knew that RHEL would get an update and
> then CentOS would. For 10 years. That has value.)
>
> Cheers,
> Andy
>
> --
> https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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