Join the LTS project to help shape Wheezy and Jessie LTS

April 24th, 2015

Almost a year after the birth of the Debian Long Term Support (LTS) project, Squeeze LTS can be considered a success. Thanks go to the many volunteers and sponsors! Debian 6 "Squeeze" has seen more than 200 security uploads since the start of its extended support period. The most widely used packages have been fixed in a timely fashion and many organizations can thus safely rely on the continued maintenance of Squeeze LTS.

Given this experience, we are confident that Debian 7 "Wheezy" and Debian 8 "Jessie" will benefit from Long Term Support.

However, some restrictions in coverage had to be made for Squeeze LTS. For example, only x86 PCs (amd64 and i386) are supported, and a number of popular packages are unsupported. For example, you cannot run a Xen dom0 or a KVM host with Squeeze, and there isn't support for graphical browsers. The current team resources are only enough to keep up with the observed workload, and would not be sufficient to extend this further.

Thus, if you want Wheezy LTS to have a better coverage for such use cases and for less popular packages, please consider helping the Debian LTS team, either with developer time or with funding.

This summer, during DebConf 15 in Heidelberg, the Debian LTS team and the Debian security team will re-assess the level of support for the project and will make plans for Wheezy LTS (Jessie LTS still has a few years ahead of it). Now is the time to show your support!

We thank all the Debian LTS contributors (Andrew Bartlett, Aurélien Jarno, Balint Reczey, Ben Hutchings, Charles Plessy, Christoph Berg, Christoph Biedl, Colin Watson, Didier Raboud, Dominic Hargreaves, Emmanuel Bouthenot, Eric Dorland, Evgeni Golov, Florian Weimer, Gregor Herrmann, Holger Levsen, Ivo de Decker, Jo Shields, Kurt Roeckx, Luciano Bello, Mathias Behrle, Mathieu Parent, Matt Palmer, Michael Meskes, Michael Vogt, Mike Gabriel, Moritz Muehlenhoff, Nguyen Cong, Osamu Aoki, Paul Gevers, Peter Palfrader, Raphael Geissert, Raphaël Hertzog, Romain Françoise, Salvatore Bonaccorso, Sébastien Delafond, Tanguy Ortolo, Thijs Kinkhorst, Thorsten Alteholz) and the organizations that let them do so: Catalyst, credativ, Électricité de France, Toshiba and Univention.

Thanks also go to all the sponsors who supported the project through Freexian's offer: The Positive Internet, David Ayers - IntarS Austria, Blablacar, Domeneshop AS, Gandi SAS, Trollweb Solutions, Université Lille 3, Bitfolk LTD, Daevel SARL, Evolix, FOSSter, Freeside Internet Service, Gree, Inc., Greenbone Networks GmbH, Intevation GmbH, Linuxhotel GmbH, Megaspace Internet Services GmbH, MyTux, NUMLOG, Nantes Métropole, Offensive Security, Seznam.cz, a.s. and WinGo AG.

About Debian

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential projects. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system .

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at https://www.debian.org/ or send mail to <debian-lts@lists.debian.org>.