Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, May 2015

A Debian LTS logo Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

Individual reports

In May, 66.25 work hours have been dispatched among 8 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

Ben Hutchings did 10.5 hours.
Guido Günther did 6 hours (of 8 assigned, he will catch up the remaining hours over June).
Holger Levsen did 2 hours (of 5 hours assigned, the remaining hours have been dispatched to other contributors).
Mike Gabriel did 8 hours.
Raphaël Hertzog did 10.25 hours.
Santiago Ruano Rincón did 10.25 hours.
Scott Kitterman did 4 hours.
Thorsten Alteholz did 10.25 hours.

Evolution of the situation

June has seen a nice increase in terms of sponsored hours (73.50 hours per month) and July shall continue this trend. All the sponsors that are with us since day 0 have just renewed their support (after the first year): many thanks to David Ayers – IntarS Austria, Domeneshop AS, Evolix, Offensive Security and Seznam.cz, a.s. !

Our first milestone of funding the equivalent of a half-time position in now within reach, we only need 9 more hours of sponsored work per month. At the current rate, that makes 2 or 3 new “average” sponsors.

In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation continued to improve: the dla-needed.txt file lists 19 packages awaiting an update (9 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 36 affected packages in total (24 less than last month).

If we keep getting more support, we will be in a good position to extend the coverage that we will offer for Wheezy LTS (notably for virtualization related packages) and we will also be able to consider switching to MySQL 5.5 for Squeeze LTS since MySQL 5.1 is no longer supported upstream (and other similar requests that tend to pop up as more and more software reach their upstream end-of-life).