Dropping Debian jessie (oldoldstable) support in R4.0

[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki]

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Hi all,

TL;DR: I propose dropping support (new updates) for Debian 8 (jessie) in
Qubes 4.0.

Since release of Debian 10 (buster), Debian 8 (jessie) is now
oldoldstable. It was released initially in 2015 and package versions are
mostly frozen since then. This means whatever update we release, it
needs to be compatible with both new APIs (Debian 10+, Fedora 30+) and
4+ years old ones. This is getting more and more challenging. For
example jessie has Python 3.4 which is no longer supported upstream and
less and less things are compatible with it. There are also compromises
we've made already - for example our U2F integration requires python
3.5, so it isn't available on jessie. Supporting 3 parallel Debian
versions also takes some time.

According to updates server logs, there are about 1000 unique IPs
checking for updates for jessie. That's about 5% our users. Obviously I
have no idea how many of them are really depending on some jessie
feature, and how many simply didn't switched to newer template. But I
guess majority of them are in the second category.

Debian jessie is also out of upstream regular security support and LTS
support will end on June 2020.

I propose to drop support for Debian 8 in R4.0 with the end of this
month. Existing VMs based on jessie will still work, but won't receive
new updates. Users are encouraged to migrate to newer Debian version -
regardless of whether we end this support or not.

If someone would like to keep support for jessie in R4.0, we'll need a
volunteer to test updates and fix potential issues (including build
issues).

- --
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
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[awokd]

> Hi all,
>
> TL;DR: I propose dropping support (new updates) for Debian 8 (jessie) in
> Qubes 4.0.

FWIW, +1 here to not supporting oldoldstable in general.

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[Foppe de Haan]

On Monday, October 28, 2019 at 4:07:47 PM UTC+1, awokd wrote:

FWIW, +1 here to not supporting oldoldstable in general.

+1