On Friday 03 November 2017 1:27:24 PM Jonas Smedegaard wrote: > Quoting Luke Dashjr (2017-11-03 11:25:23) > > > On Friday 03 November 2017 9:10:37 AM you wrote: > >> I believe Bitcoin is now stable enough for stable release. > > > > Things have only gotten less stable upstream since 2013... > > Please provide references supporting that.
Back in 2013 (0.8.0 release), I was still supporting stable versions 0.4.x (originally released in 2011), 0.5.x (OR 2011), 0.6.x (OR 2012), and 0.7.x (OR 2012). No such long-term support is provided anymore - we only maintain the most recent 2 versions (with a 6 month release schedule), which gives approximately 1 year of support to any particular release. Furthermore, with increasing miner hostilities to Bitcoin in the last few years, the importance of timely deployment of softforks is even more crucial to security than previously. This past August, there was a fear that miners would violate the new softfork rules, causing a chainsplit. If that had occurred, obsolete nodes would have been vulnerable. > > What is the plan for getting security and protocol change updates > > backported to Debian stable? > > Debian standard procedures for updating stable packages. In my experience, that has been "never update, even when fixes are available" except for highly-visible security issues. :( Luke
