-----Original Message-----
From: Cyril Brulebois <k...@debian.org>
To: Simon Richter <simon.rich...@hogyros.de>
Cc: debian-de...@lists.debian.org, debian-embed...@lists.debian.org, 
debootst...@packages.debian.org, cdebootst...@packages.debian.org
Sent: Fri, 07 Nov 2014 10:45
Subject: Re: debootstrap and cdebootstrap vs systemd

> You might want to stop accepting 2.6 as a base kernel version.

Apologies in advance. You really hit a nerve here.

Kernel 3.7 was released December 2012. Debian project created a dependency on 
this for the default init system roughly 15 months later. Which is fine, and 
perfectly understandable. It makes sense. I don't want to argue that.

But please don't make light of the situation for those who can't apt-get 
install hardware-redesign beg-silicon-vendor-for-updates 
port-and-re-validate-custom-undocumented-modules 
go-back-in-time-and-teach-hardware-engineers-linux-kernel-lifecycle

3.7 is less than 2 years ago even today, apparently even that is a blip in many 
embedded hardware solutions' life-cycle. Some manufacturing sectors are still 
selling m68k and Z80 CPUs. For SoCs though, it seems the tradition is: fork a 
particular Linux kernel release, mangle it beyond recognition, throw it over 
the wall and then act like customers are speaking an alien language if they 
ever ask for updates.

"Don't accept old kernels" is almost equivalent to telling many unrelated 
businesses in a particular ecosystem to burn their investments and start again 
from scratch, just because the SoC and/or board vendors have a broken business 
model. And that's hard to explain to business people and even hardware 
engineers that a chip/board/subsystem is "unsupported" even though supply 
guarantees stretch out to the year 2020 and beyond.

And for all I know, perhaps these businesses deserve everything that happens to 
them, who knows.

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