I recently moved my VM off of Trusty, and when completing the process I noticed that the new VM's image (Debian Stretch 9.5) was labelled "deprecated", although the VM is about 7 weeks old. Looking through the list of Debian images, it seems that they get deprecated every couple of months or so.

I'm unsure what that means for me as a maintainer, so I thought I'd ask here. Looking to strike a balance between not having me spending time on upgrading (rather than maintaining SuggestBot), and keeping the sysadmins happy but not running old software, what's some good rules of thumb here? Should I schedule time to move to a new VM within a given time frame (say 3 months, or 6 months)? Or maybe it's better to stick with what I have now and wait until there's a definite reason for upgrading (e.g. similar to what I did with Trusty)?

Regards,

Morten