Am 16. Aug, 2003 schw=E4tzte Jeremy C. Reed so:

> Does Debian really support old Debian releases? For example, Potato was
> supported for a long time. But as of June 30, it is now unsupported.

debian only maintains stable. The old stable is supported for a short perio=
d
of time after a new stable is released. That's how it is for potato anyway.
Future efforts are planned to be similar. OTOH, they've streamlined the
security mechanisms and there was rumor that they would offer longer
security support for the older distros, so woody support might go on longer=
=2E

In any case there will have been at least 2 years of woody support due to
the time it's taken to get sarge out, should sarge ever be released.

> Debian also has had problems with upgrading from old versions to new
> versions. It is getting a lot better now. (I should rephrase that:

That has not been my experience. debian is the only distro that has
dist-upgraded from one version to another. There have been a couple of mino=
r
problems, but they were covered in the errata documentation.

I've only been working with debian for a few years, though. Mostly installe=
d
a pre-release potato or later.

Some things were very difficult, e.g. install potato, then migrate to ext3
or reiser.

> Debian offers the most reliable and easiest package upgrade mechanism I
> have used.) But over the past 6+ years of using Debian, I have spent a lo=
t
> of time manually updating versions of apt-get, dpkg (including having to
> revert to older versions), et cetera, so the upgrades would work
> correctly.

I've mostly only run into that using testing and unstable. Even then I've
not run into it much.

> Having an end of life of old versions is definitely a good idea.
> Developers (volunteers) should spend their time on new or recent code, in
> my opinion.

True for most cases. 'Enterprise' level stuff needs longer life-cycles. The=
y
should also be paying for that support, though.

> Also, if the end-of-life'd Red Hat is really good, of course, someone
> could spend their time keeping it alive and up-to-date (and fork a new
> project/distro out of it). But it doesn't really seem worth it.

http://www.pantek.com/

Anyone know of any other companies offering something similar? Any
commercial companies offering debian support?

I talked to Progeny, they don't do distro support.

ciao,

der.hans
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