Debian 7 Wheezy LTS period ends on May 31st and some companies asked Freexian if they could get security support past this date. Since about half of the current team of paid LTS contributors is willing to continue to provide security updates for Wheezy, I have started to work on making this possible.
I just initiated a discussion on debian-devel with multiple Debian teams to see whether it is possible to continue to use debian.org infrastructure to host the wheezy security updates that would be prepared in this extended LTS period.
From the sponsor side, this extended LTS will not work like the regular LTS. It is unrealistic to continue to support all packages and all architectures so only the packages/architectures requested by sponsors will be supported. The amount invoiced to each sponsor will be directly related to the package list that they ask us to support. We made an estimation (based on history) of how much it costs to support each package and we split that cost between all the sponsors that are requesting support for this package. That cost is re-evaluated quarterly and will likely increase over time as sponsors are stopping their support (when they finished to migrate all their machines for example).
This extended LTS will also have some restrictions in terms of packages that we can support. For instance, we will no longer support the linux kernel from wheezy, you will have to switch to the kernel used in jessie (or maybe we will maintain a backport ourselves in wheezy). It is also not yet clear whether we can support OpenJDK since upstream support of version 7 stops at the end of June. And switching to OpenJDK 8 is likely non-trivial. There are likely other unsupportable packages too.
Anyway, if your company needs wheezy security support past end of May, now is the time to worry about it. Please send us a mail with the list of source packages that you would like to see supported. The more companies get involved, the less it will cost to each of them. Our plans are to gather the required data from interested companies in the next few weeks and make a first estimation of the price they will have to pay for the first quarter by mid-march. Then they confirm that they are OK with the offer and we will emit invoices in April so that they can be paid before end of May.
Note however that we decided that it would not be possible to sponsor extended wheezy support (and thus influence which packages are supported) if you are not among the regular LTS sponsors (at bronze level at least). Extended LTS would not be possible without the regular LTS so if you need the former, you have to support the latter too.
I have started using Wheezy as my MS Vista os crashed. It is mounted on a Shuttle X 1.9Gib, Celeron 2.4Ghz, Vesa 32bit and 78.3g HDD
This machine works very well with the exception of firefox which is very slow. It blends well with my lan 2pc’s inc this and my laptop. I set this machine up a couple of years ago, but did not use it that much, as I had two windows pcs. It is fully updated.
As I was down to one windows desktop I thought I would bring wheezy into regular use. My main useage is Libre Calc and Writer. The internet can be got from laptop or other Desktop.
I went on to Forums.Debian asking about adding a couple of fonts to wheezy and was criticised to even trying to continue with Wheezy and told to ugrade to Stretch.
Well my old Vista machine being a HP pavilion 2.8Gib and dual core prosessor was fitted with a 320g hdd and I installed stretch. This works ok and is fast but locks up due to memory issues. It also refuses to connect to my HP Laserjet p1102w, HPLIP error, but will print to my HP C6280 multifunction machine.
The reason I am telling you all this is so that you know where I am coming from. I belong to the group that believe “If it aint broke, don’t fix it” My vista o/s was long time not supported so no problems there.
So my plan is to use Wheezy for as long as it works and not have to worry about it. I am ugrading the memory on the HP Pavilion to 8gig so it should not lock up so much. Fire it up every day to get the updates and that will be that.
Both Wheezy and Stretch give me the Gnome desktop, which is great.
What surprises me that an obsolete os finds and prints to all my printers, will access my windows shares, does not lock up and people are telling me it is wrong to use it. Why is that??
btw I have been working with unix since 1993, not all the time, starting with Sco 3.2.4 to openserver, also Suse, FreeBSD and now settled with Debian. More a user than a programmer