Salt: ongoing Debian 7 Package Support

[MorphBonehunter]

Today i realised the release note message for the 2016.3.1:

Final Release of Debian 7 Packages

Regular security support for Debian 7 ended on April 25th 2016. As a result, 2016.3.1 and 2015.8.10 will be the last Salt releases for which Debian 7 packages are created.

As it is right that the regular support was endet on April 25th 2016 the Debian LTS Support kicks in.
With this the support then ends on 31st May 2018.

So why did you plan not releasing further versions of Salt to Debian 7?

I'm working at an German Datacenter and at the moment we run more than 500 Debian 7 Systems for our customers and our own and most of them do not plan to upgrade to Debian 8 because the support is there for another two years.
I'm shure there are other Salt users with the same "problem" so please think about it again.

Thanks!

[babilen5]

I totally agree that it would be great to have packages for wheezy until LTS support runs out. We have recently uploaded 2016.3.0 to jessie-backports and a backport of salt to wheezy-backports-sloppy would be an option, but requires backports of sphinx and pygments also.

[thatch45]

At this point we are only supporting with packages Debian stable and oldstable and NOT the LTS release cycle. Or overall policy is that we support distributions only as long as those distributions receive full upstream support. So for Debian this suggests that we do not do LTS support since that is separate from the official Debian project

[meggiebot]

We are working on an official OS support policy for our website, it should be complete soon.

I also wanted to add that community members who want Wheezy packages could use Salt Pack to package them and they can even be hosted on repo.saltstack.com. You would just need to sign them yourself. https://github.com/saltstack/salt-pack

[babilen5]

I wouldn't necessarily say that LTS support is separate from the official Debian project, because it is just handled by a different team than the security team (even though there is quite some overlap).

In the end it will be a political and strategic decision by Saltstack to support LTS releases or not. If wheezy support is indeed dropped the community will have to take over.

[Talkless]

That's a little disappointing. I understand that Wheezy shouldn't receive new _major_ versions, (Carbon and others), but since Boron is already out, not getting fixes for it and leave it on .1 minor is kinda strange.

Is there really that much difference between Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Debian Wheezy LTS? They both receive updates for limited set of packages, but Salt supports Wheezy for only 3 years?

[thatch45]

Deciding when to stop supporting an upstream distro is very difficult to do. Given your arguments it may be a good idea to maintain Debian LTS through a major release instead of just cut it off mid lifecycle.

[MorphBonehunter]

Any news on this?
This is still an big topic for us as we decide on our company strategy to use salt.
So we would like to see an offical statement to this so we could decide if we have to rethink our strategy or if we should invest in menpower for creating our own packages.

[babilen5]

@MorphBonehunter - Please also refer to the discussion in #31764

I think that wheezy (and future releases) should be supported for the time they have LTS support.

[MorphBonehunter]

Hehe...nice,
Thats an issue from an co-worker on initialy an slightly other topic but seems to be the same now ;)
Thanks for the hint.

[babilen5]

Well, the underlying question is the same: "Can we run Saltstack on all supported platforms?" and it simply boils down to "What does it take to be supported?".

[thatch45]

We have changed our support structure to keep Debian oldstable support around longer. We just pushed new packages for Salt 2016.3.3 for Debian 7 and will keep them coming as long as it is still considered "oldstable"

[MorphBonehunter]

Thanks a lot!

[Talkless]

Thanks! That's great news!

[MorphBonehunter]

@thatch45 / @meggiebot i have to revive this ticket.
It seems that i misinterpret your last answer for supporting Debian7 (only until it's not called oldstable" anymore) and i read today on repo.saltstack.com:

Due to the release of Debian 9 and Debian 8 becoming oldstable,
2016.11.5 is the last Salt release for which Debian 7 packages are created.

Debian 7 ist still supported until 31st May 2018 (https://wiki.debian.org/LTS) and as Saltstack supports the other Distries until End of Life, why is this handled different with Debian 7?
Yes its not "oldstable" anymore but still supported and so i wonder why saltstack support ends premature.
I know that Debian 8 is 2 years old, but we do still have many customers which use "old" Versions as long as they are supported.