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Comment by hannob | Hacker News Reader

Your comment kinda embodies everything that is complicated about Linux distribution support.

You use an LTS distribution, yet you want to have bleeding edge features. It sounds like you simply want two things that are in contradiction to each other.

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Yeah LTS or bleeding edge is always time relative. For example OpenSSL 1.1.1 is the new LTS release https://www.openssl.org/blog/blog/2018/09/11/release111/

> After two years of work we are excited to be releasing our latest version today - OpenSSL 1.1.1. This is also our new Long Term Support (LTS) version and so we are committing to support it for at least five years.

Yeah, it doesn’t make sense. If he wants the new new stuff why not run 18.10, wait a month until 19.04 arrives, or switch to a rolling release distro?

There is no reason not to provide all the stable branches and development/bleeding edge branches for packages and let people choose what they want, except for package management practices still stuck in 20th century.

Indeed in ideal world that would be the perfect solution.

It would cause a combinatorial explosion: if you have only 10 packages with both stable and bleeding edge branches, this is already over a thousand possible combinations. That makes it harder to support, and the whole point of an LTS distribution is to have support for a somewhat longer time.

But it's all tied to time. So, for example, at any point in time there are latest stable packages that should only depend on other latest stable packages, there is no point doing other combinations, hence no combinatorial explosion. And if it doesn't work with the latest stable dependency, it will never work with it anyway and has to be linked with previous stable branch of that dependency, still the only version though and no combinatorial explosion. No matter how you look at it, time constraints possible combinations to a small number.

So use the regular releases, they are just what you want.

What does “support” in “long term support” mean if not “support the current stable version of the most widely used cryptosystem on the planet”?

I think the arbitrary distinction of “point releases can include x but not y” where x is bugfixes related to security and stability and y is bugfixes in a protocol means that there is not a contradiction there.

> What does “support” in “long term support” mean if not “support the current stable version of the most widely used cryptosystem on the planet”?

It means "support whatever was included in the distribution for a long time". That is, what matters is the "current stable version" at the moment the distribution was originally released.

> where x is bugfixes related to security and stability and y is bugfixes in a protocol means that there is not a contradiction there.

TLS 1.3 is a new protocol, not a bugfix. A bugfix to the protocol would be something like the renegotiation extension (RFC 5746).

> It means "support whatever was included in the distribution for a long time".

The TLS protocol was included in the distribution. (You seem to be using a self-recursive definition of “support”.)

"The TLS protocol" wasn't included in the distribution. "The TLS protocol" isn't a package a distro can version-lock and support. OpenSSL is.

If you want versions as they become available use a rolling release. LTS is attractive specifically because they don't do that.

I don't want my server upgrading packages beyond necessary security improvements. That's why I'm on an LTS release.

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