Use Debian jessie or xenial-proposed as backports in trusty?

[Lukas Erlacher]

Hi!

On 04.04.2016 10:23, Karl Auer wrote:
> On Mon, 2016-04-04 at 09:53 +0200, Lukas Erlacher wrote:
>> I am pretty frustrated with the age of most packets in trusty, but my
>> organisation has standardised on Ubuntu LTS version. trusty-backports
>> is pretty meh, so - is there an easy and sensible way to install
>> newer packets, e.g. from Debian jessie or xenial-proposed, into
>> trusty without breakage?
> 
> Are you a system administrator with your organisation?

Yes, I am.

> 
> Organisations generally go with LTS versions because they want to
> exchange currency for stability. Working around such a policy if you
> are responsible for other people's computers has the potential to be a
> career-limiting move, especially if you introduce data
> incompatibilities or cause a security breach. But deliberately
> bypassing policy like that would normally be considered a pretty
> serious failure all on its own, even if it caused no immediate harm.
> 

The data incompatibilities and security breaches are already happening, they're in trusty already. See these two bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/calamaris/+bug/1563202 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/squid3/+bug/1473691

Our current solution to this is basically getting upstream tarballs and running "sudo make install" and that's terrible for exactly the reasons you mention.

I'm trying to fix that.

> Bear in mind that a new LTS is imminent, and will probably be being
> deployed in organisations like yours in six months or so.

I am aware of that, but I don't think it'll solve all our problems with outdated packages.

Best,
Luke

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