On 2023-11-16, the Freexian Extended LTS Team published ELA-1000-1, pertaining to the ceph package. In recognition of this remarkable milestone, this article will take a brief look back over the history of Extended LTS.
The Extended LTS offering first began in June 2018. In the nearly five and a half years since, the Extended LTS Team has published 1000 ELAs (Extended LTS Advisory) covering over 3100 CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures).
The number of ELAs and the associated CVEs are rather noteworthy, as the scope of supported packages under the Extended LTS offering is smaller than the scope of packages supported under the standard LTS offering. We expect to continue providing an outstanding Extended LTS service well into the future, with preparations already under way for Debian 10 to transition from LTS to Extended LTS.
As always, organizations using the current versions falling under Extended LTS, Debian 9 Stretch and Debian 8 Jessie, are encouraged to subscribe to Freexian’s Extended LTS until they are able to upgrade to a more recent Debian release.
Organizations using Debian 10/11/12 should consider sponsoring the Debian LTS team in order to help ensure the best possible security support for those Debian releases. This is the best way to let the LTS team know which packages are important for their sponsors and thus which packages deserve special effort to be kept alive (i.e. avoid early end-of-life) when upstream support ends or when preparing security updates becomes technically difficult.
We extend our thanks to the many customers whose subscriptions make Extended LTS possible, both the visible package security updates as well as the behind-the-scenes improvements which Extended LTS Team members are able to contribute to the broader Debian and Free Software communities.