Just like we did for Debian 7 Wheezy, some of the paid Debian LTS contributors will continue to maintain Debian 8 Jessie after its 5 years of support as part of Freexian’s Extended LTS service.
This service works differently than regular LTS:
- only the packages used by the sponsors are supported;
- the updates are provided in an external repository managed by Freexian so that Debian teams can bury Debian 8 Jessie and move on;
- the cost of the service for each sponsor is evaluated each semester based on the number of packages that they want to see supported and the number of other sponsors with similar needs;
- a limited set of architectures is supported (usually only amd64 and i386, but for Jessie it might be that we end up supporting armel due to a sponsor requesting it).
Some packages will not be supported:
- linux 3.16 (instead we will likely continue to maintain the linux-4.9 backport from Debian 9 stretch)
- openjdk-7 (its EOL is on June 2020), we might maintain a backport of openjdk-8 if there’s demand for it
- tomcat7 will only be supported until its EOL in March 2021
- this list might be expanded over time when we discover issues rendering security support infeasible on some packages
If you expect to have Debian 8 servers/devices running after June 30th 2020, and would like to have security updates for them, please get in touch with us. We’re building a list of potential sponsors right now and we expect to provide cost estimations at the end of the month.