The Debian Long Term Support (LTS) developers have announced that they are dropping support for certain packages as part of the extended life cycle for the Debian GNU/Linux 7 "Wheezy" operating system.

At the end of April 2016, we reported on the fact that the Debian GNU/Linux 7 operating system, which many of you know as "Wheezy," was considered by the Debian LTS team eligible to receive long-term support.

Of course, this means that those who are still using the Debian GNU/Linux 7.x series of operating systems on their personal computers or servers will receive security patches and software updates for two more years, until May 2018.

However, as noted at that time, some of the packages included in the Debian "Wheezy" repositories will no longer be supported by the Debian LTS team, so users were urged to install the debian-security-support package to detect them.

VLC 2.0.3, SoGo 1.3.16, MediaWiki 1.19.20 are no longer supported

Version 2016.05.24~deb7u1 of the debian-security-support landed in the repositories a couple of days ago, updating the list of packages that the Debian LTS team will no longer provide support for, and among these are VLC 2.0.3-5+deb7u2, mediawiki 1:1.19.20+dfsg-0+deb7u3, sogo 1.3.16-1, and libv8 3.8.9.20-2.

But there are numerous other applications that aren't supported anymore for Debian 7 users, so if you rely on those packages, the Debian LTS team recommends that you upgrade to the latest stable release of the operating system, Debian GNU/Linux 8 "Jessie," as soon as possible.

Please note, though, that MediaWiki support has been dropped from the Debian "Jessie" branch as well. If you want to know which software won't receive support in your Debian distribution, we recommend installing the debian-security-support package and running it from time to time to find out their status.