> Which does open the question: how many people need LTS? (And what does > LTS mean for them - in terms of how long support would be needed, and > what level of support/backports they expect.) Perhaps Chris could chip > in here, but I know that with my $DAYJOB hat on the idea of dropping > security updates for release X as soon as release Y comes out is a bit > of a non-starter.
We care almost entirely about security updates. It would be nice to get updates for data-loss or panic-your-system problems as well, but it's not as essential as we very much hope not to hit one once we have qualified a production environment, and some of them will make applying updates more dangerous (since you're talking about more changes and changes to things like the kernel). We need this for at least two years per release, ideally with six months or so overlap of security updates between LTS releases. We need such a long support period (and the overlap) because in our environment, qualifying and rolling out a new release is not something that we can do easily, rapidly, or very often. OmniOS sits at the center of our fileserver infrastructure, which sits at the center of our entire environment; if a fileserver has problems, *everything* has problems (and then a bunch of professors and graduate students get angry at us, which has various bad consequences for everyone). (This also applies to some updates within a single release, especially kernel updates. An updated kernel is not too far off from a new release unless it only has very narrow and very specific fixes that we can be highly confident in.) A few months ago (when the initial OmniOS news broke) I wrote more about our needs here: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/IllumosDistributionNeeds Background on our fileserver environment is here: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSFileserverSetupII - cks _______________________________________________ OmniOS-discuss mailing list OmniOS-discuss@lists.omniti.com http://lists.omniti.com/mailman/listinfo/omnios-discuss