Hi Ben, On Wed, Apr 03, 2019 at 12:23:46AM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote: > Debian LTS is a team within Debian. It's separate from the main > security team and the stable release managers, but it is no less part > of Debian.
Sure, I do understand that. My employer is one of the LTS sponsors. However what I am saying is, there are clearly quite a few users of Debian who were surprised and confused about jessie-updates going away. I think that means those users also did not know that they transitioned from relying on the security team and release managers to the LTS team. Clearly the LTS team cannot provide the same level of support, so wouldn't you agree that it is important that users realise when they go from one state to another? > The transition to extended support by the LTS team has always been > announced, in any case: Absolutely, but these users did not read those announcements, or else I think they wouldn't have been so confused by jessie-updates going away. The majority of end user posts about this that I have seen have not been saying, "this is annoying, just make it stop", they have been more like, "what is going on? Is my sources.list incorrect?" i.e. I'm not convinced these posts are coming from people who read any of the various announcement emails. I've supported a couple of my own users with questions about the apt update errors and none them knew what LTS was or that they had already been using it for nearly a year. From their point of view while "apt update" continued to work without complaint, they were enjoying full Debian support. I have a feeling this wrong impression may be quite common. So, various people are asking for an empty jessie-updates to be put back because of all the confused users and the need to make changes to sources.list. I am asking: a) doesn't that suggest that many or all of these users missed that they transitioned to LTS back in June 2018, and only noticed that something was amiss now that jessie-updates has gone? b) if in future Debian does leave an empty stretch-updates then doesn't that mean that these users will continue being blissfully unaware for an even longer period of time? c) if getting warnings from "apt update" does seem to be an effective final way to reach such users, would it be a good idea to find a way to have apt tell them about their transition into LTS? Personally I'm not bothered either way about whether "<distro>-updates" remains something that can be in sources.list without causing update errors, but I am more concerned that a lot of users may have ended up transitioning to LTS without realising that, and wonder if there is any good way to help reduce that. Cheers, Andy
