Debian 6.0

[Ng Oon-Ee]

On Mon, 2011-02-07 at 20:25 +0100, Nicolas Sebrecht wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 07, 2011 at 02:02:42PM -0500, Philippe LeCavalier wrote:
> 
> > Are we not shooting ourselves in the foot by risking pissing off such a large community? 
> > 
> > Nicolas, I must admit I'm disappointed by these comments...
> 
> Well, I'm pissing off anyone. I'm just reading the result. People can
> look by themselves and make their own opinion.
> 
> Now, packaging policy and maintenance is not (or should not be, at
> least) something relying on affinities. It's all about software and what
> it can do for us.
> 
> Disagreements happen, we are human.
> 
Distros which maintain 'stable' versions take on the responsibility for
maintaining the old 'stable' versions (which sometimes seem arbitrarily
selected as 'whichever was latest at the cut-off point in time'). No
software project (beyond the very biggest) can hope to provide support
for a version almost 2 years out of date (and I think Debian long-term
support is 3 years?).

This is the practice on other software mailing lists as well, I believe.
At the very least, evolution, pulseaudio, ffmpeg, all of them first ask
"what distro are you using" and then "please upgrade to the latest" and
"if not, please ask your distro support mechanism".