Hi,
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
On 12/21/18 3:36 PM, Morten Wang wrote:
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.
It just means you should use one of the newer images to start new VMs.
The VMs you started using the Debian 9.5 image are fine. If you apply updates regularly, they should be equivalent to the 9.6 or later images.
Starting with the 9.6 image today just means a bunch of package updates are pre-applied.
From https://www.debian.org/News/2018/20181110:
-- Please note that the point release does not constitute a new version of Debian 9 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old stretch media. After installation, packages can be upgraded to the current versions using an up-to-date Debian mirror.
Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won't have to update many packages, and most such updates are included in the point release. --