On Fri, 2018-01-12 at 07:50 +0100, Alexander Wirt wrote: > On Fri, 12 Jan 2018, Ben Hutchings wrote: > > > On Wed, 2018-01-10 at 11:13 -0600, Xan Charbonnet wrote: > > > Hello, > > > > > > Is a Meltdown fix for the wheezy-backports kernel (3.16) on the way? > > > Thanks very much! > > > > I'm sorry to tell you that wheezy-backports has not been supported for > > nearly a year now. This was never widely announced (I can no longer > > find the announcement) and I think this end-of-life was handled > > extremely badly by the backports administrators. > > It was handled badly by the backporters. I really hope you don't expect > the administrators to do the backports. There was a discussion and nearly > noone was in favour of doing those backports. I was happy to continue backporting linux, but I accept that it would be hard to explain that some small subset of packages was supported. I don't object to the decision itself. > And of course we announced it - as we always do announce changes: > > https://backports.debian.org/news/stretch-backports/ > https://lists.debian.org/debian-backports/2017/06/msg00055.html The announcement is nominally about stretch-backports, so is not obviously relevant to someone who uses wheezy-backports. In fact, *nowhere* does it explicitly mention wheezy-backports; several times it mentions squeeze-backports instead. The reader has to work hard to see that "LTS" means this is actually ending wheezy-backports as well as squeeze-backports. Secondly, this message was only sent to debian-backports (general discussion) and not to debian-backports-announce. So it's no wonder that some users didn't see it. Finally, wheezy-backports remains part of the main archive, which normally implies that it's a supported suite. It should have been moved to archive.debian.org. The resulting error messages from "apt- get update" would reach those users who didn't see the announcement. So, please make a more explicit announcement and get wheezy-backports removed from the main archive. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings If you seem to know what you are doing, you'll be given more to do.
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