I was part of the Ubuntu decision at GitHub, and it was based on the fact that Ubuntu gave you much longer support after the next release. Debian (at the time) only guaranteed even security updates on previous releases for one year after a new release.
Just wondering, not an attack: did you talk to the Debian project to see what resources (money or person-time) are needed to support a Debian release for a longer time?
I am asking, because Debian is a community project and in the end it gives what its community members are putting in. I am wondering about the amount of effort necessary.
It seems that they estimate it at one person, full time [1]. Which does not seem a lot, given the number of organizations that use Debian.
Why would they talk to anybody? Support decisions were already made (for a reason) for both releases. Trying to revise them and committing on '?' for an array of production servers is a horrible idea.
Exactly this. It would have seemed pretty presumptuous to ask the Debian project to change the support model that they decided worked for them to support us.
We were also faced with a very large new infrastructure build and we knew we were at the end of the line with Squeeze but Wheezy had't quite yet shipped, which put us in an awkward position.
Debian is a great distribution, but at the time we felt like Ubuntu was the right way to go given the existing support policies.
Comments
I was part of the Ubuntu decision at GitHub, and it was based on the fact that Ubuntu gave you much longer support after the next release. Debian (at the time) only guaranteed even security updates on previous releases for one year after a new release.
Just wondering, not an attack: did you talk to the Debian project to see what resources (money or person-time) are needed to support a Debian release for a longer time?
I am asking, because Debian is a community project and in the end it gives what its community members are putting in. I am wondering about the amount of effort necessary.
It seems that they estimate it at one person, full time [1]. Which does not seem a lot, given the number of organizations that use Debian.
[1] http://www.freexian.com/en/services/debian-lts.html
Why would they talk to anybody? Support decisions were already made (for a reason) for both releases. Trying to revise them and committing on '?' for an array of production servers is a horrible idea.
Exactly this. It would have seemed pretty presumptuous to ask the Debian project to change the support model that they decided worked for them to support us.
We were also faced with a very large new infrastructure build and we knew we were at the end of the line with Squeeze but Wheezy had't quite yet shipped, which put us in an awkward position.
Debian is a great distribution, but at the time we felt like Ubuntu was the right way to go given the existing support policies.