Marek Marczykowski-Górecki: > [moved discussion from ticket #2065] > > On Fri, Nov 30, 2018 at 11:44:21AM +0000, Patrick Schleizer wrote: >> Is it possible to make changes in Qubes packages only affecting Debian >> releases equal or greater than 9? > >> Inability to do so would make development difficult. Not a secret that I am >> not a big fan of carrying around oldstable versions support. Lot effort for >> little to zero popularity? I'd not release new Qubes packages for debian-8 >> in order to not break them. Only debian-9 and above. Otherwise too many >> targets required to test / too much development effort, imo. > > Actually the same problem applies to Fedora, with an exception that many > of those templates are not even supported upstream anymore (in contrast > to oldstable, which is still part of Debian LTS, until 2020). > > So here are actually two questions: > 1. Do we want to stop publishing new packages for templates not > supported upstream anymore? > 2. Do we want to stop publishing new packages for old templates still > supported upstream?
Both, yes. I mean, what's lost if we don't? > I think the answer for the first one should be "YES". Look at the insane > count of Fedora versions for R3.2 on supported-versions[1]. > We just need a process for doing that: > - an announcement? we had already some[2] > - some method for marking this on supported-versions page (simply > remove version? or should we retain what were initially supported?) Perhaps QVMM could show and visually(!) mark template packages as obsolete? This visual mark should be removable after the user upgraded. Perhaps a dom0 one time popup with a reminder? Using /etc/qubes/post-install.d/ mechanism? That would hint users at having to upgrade. > In fact, I've already went ahead and disabled building packages for old > Fedora versions[3], mostly to reduce build time. Oh, Fedora 27 upstream > support ends today, so we could drop this one from the list too. And > post a reminder to migrate to Fedora 28 (or have we already done it? I > can't find it). Yes. > Now, about the second question. It is about Debian 8 and Whonix 13 > (based on Debian 8). Since Debian 8 was included originally > in both Qubes 3.2 and 4.0, many people surely do use it. I don't have > hard numbers for that (in theory we could collect such stats from our > updates server, but we don't do that right now). Since Debian 8 still > has upstream security support, there is no security-based reason for > dropping it. But as Patrick said, it makes it difficult to maintain. > Especially since Debian 8 is much older than oldest supported Fedora... > > This already lead to one major problem: > https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/4443 > > In theory, automated testing could help here. We already have a lot of > tests, and actually the problem linked above would be detected by it. Even if detected, it's still a burden to develop stuff in a way being compatible with old versions. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to qubes-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to qubes-devel@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-devel/66eea35b-20f1-e417-939f-77561ca9d807%40whonix.org. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
