Hey Andy,

I'd argue for using the "end of standard support" dates for Ubuntu. I suspect that's the generally well known "EOL" date (5 years from release of the LTS) that most folk will know. It's certainly the date that I try to stick to with upgrades and such.

Cheers,
James

On Thu, 28 Jan 2021, 4:47 pm Andy Smith, <andy@bitfolk.com> 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

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