Fwd: [ros-users] Upcoming suspention of debian packaging for EOL Ubuntu distros

[Arto Bendiken]

FYI, discussion last week about Debian/Ubuntu packaging policies and
EOLs for ROS:

http://lists.ros.org/pipermail/ros-users/2016-February/069828.html


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tully Foote via ros-users <ros-...@lists.ros.org>
Date: Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 10:59 PM
Subject: [ros-users] Upcoming suspention of debian packaging for EOL
Ubuntu distros
To: User discussions <ros-...@lists.ros.org>


Hi Everyone,

As some of you may have been aware we have always planned to drop
support for EOL'd Ubuntu distros, however we have not done so due to
our build farm not being able to disable the builds without breaking
users operating from source.

As announced last week we have rolled out our new build farm. One of
the new features of the new build farm is that we can now disable
specific target platforms for building new packages without removing
all references to the target platform. This allows users to keep using
the older distros if they want to continue building from source. And
as always we will continue to keep the existing debian packages
available. The only difference is that we no longer will be releasing
updates.

For Indigo and Jade the Ubuntu distributions Saucy and Utopic have
already reached their end of life. And Vivid's EOL is tomorrow. (See
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases for EOL dates.) And as such we plan
to stop building for those platforms by the end of this month.

For maintainers we are staging a sync at the moment. We expect one
final sync in the middle of February to be the final one before we
turn off the builds for Saucy, Utopic, and Vivid. Please keep that in
mind as you plan your upcoming releases.

In the future when other Ubuntu versions reach EOL we expect to stop
building for them promptly after the EOL date since at that time
Ubuntu will also no longer be providing updates as well.

Tully

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[Mike Gogulski]

Given this, I propose dropping Vivid from the build farm, leaving us
with these Ubuntu distros:

14.04 Trusty (LTS, EOL April 2019)
15.10 Wily (EOL July 2016)
16.04 Xenial (LTS pre-release, release coming April 2016)

Any objection?

[Arto Bendiken]

On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 2:35 PM, Mike Gogulski <mi...@gogulski.com> wrote:
> Given this, I propose dropping Vivid from the build farm, leaving us
> with these Ubuntu distros:
>
> 14.04 Trusty (LTS, EOL April 2019)
> 15.10 Wily (EOL July 2016)
> 16.04 Xenial (LTS pre-release, release coming April 2016)

Looks good to me.

To formalize the notion, we'll build binaries for max. the two most
recent LTS releases, plus the most recent one or two biannual non-LTS
releases up until they EOL.

--
Arto Bendiken | @bendiken | http://ar.to

[Mike Gogulski]

I'm good with that, with the qualification that there's no reason to go
back to 12.04 Precise LTS at this point, given its age, that 14.04 is
nearly 2 years old, and that 16.04 is just around the corner.

I just trashed the Vivid VM, so job complete.

[Arto Bendiken]

On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 7:07 PM, Mike Gogulski <mi...@gogulski.com> wrote:
> I'm good with that, with the qualification that there's no reason to go
> back to 12.04 Precise LTS at this point, given its age, that 14.04 is
> nearly 2 years old, and that 16.04 is just around the corner.

The max. two LTSes was meant more for the start of the sequence right
now. That is, there's no way we'll ever support 12.04--it's four years
old at this point--but neither would it make much sense for us to stop
supporting 14.04 right after 16.04 comes out soonish.

So, for present purposes it's obvious we do want to support both 14.04
and 16.04. The question going forward is whether there will be a point
before 18.04 where it would make sense for us to drop support for
14.04. I would suggest punting that question for now--we'll certainly
want to support 14.04 to, say, end of year, regardless.

[Mike Gogulski]

On 02/10/2016 07:54 PM, Arto Bendiken wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 7:07 PM, Mike Gogulski <mi...@gogulski.com> wrote:
>> I'm good with that, with the qualification that there's no reason to go
>> back to 12.04 Precise LTS at this point, given its age, that 14.04 is
>> nearly 2 years old, and that 16.04 is just around the corner.
> The max. two LTSes was meant more for the start of the sequence right
> now. That is, there's no way we'll ever support 12.04--it's four years
> old at this point--but neither would it make much sense for us to stop
> supporting 14.04 right after 16.04 comes out soonish.

Agreed.

> So, for present purposes it's obvious we do want to support both 14.04
> and 16.04. The question going forward is whether there will be a point
> before 18.04 where it would make sense for us to drop support for
> 14.04. I would suggest punting that question for now--we'll certainly
> want to support 14.04 to, say, end of year, regardless.
>

Deferring the question makes sense. My impulse now is to say something
about tracking Canonical's release/LTS schedule, but we can't know the
future evolution of requirements for our external dependencies (ROS,
OpenCV), nor indeed for conreality itself.