[OmniOS-discuss] OmniOS CE question: will there be a LTS stable release?

[Chris Siebenmann]

> Which does open the question: how many people need LTS? (And what does
> LTS mean for them - in terms of how long support would be needed, and
> what level of support/backports they expect.) Perhaps Chris could chip
> in here, but I know that with my $DAYJOB hat on the idea of dropping
> security updates for release X as soon as release Y comes out is a bit
> of a non-starter.

 We care almost entirely about security updates. It would be nice to
get updates for data-loss or panic-your-system problems as well, but
it's not as essential as we very much hope not to hit one once we have
qualified a production environment, and some of them will make applying
updates more dangerous (since you're talking about more changes and
changes to things like the kernel).

 We need this for at least two years per release, ideally with six
months or so overlap of security updates between LTS releases. We need
such a long support period (and the overlap) because in our environment,
qualifying and rolling out a new release is not something that we can
do easily, rapidly, or very often. OmniOS sits at the center of our
fileserver infrastructure, which sits at the center of our entire
environment; if a fileserver has problems, *everything* has problems
(and then a bunch of professors and graduate students get angry at us,
which has various bad consequences for everyone).

(This also applies to some updates within a single release, especially
kernel updates. An updated kernel is not too far off from a new release
unless it only has very narrow and very specific fixes that we can be
highly confident in.)

 A few months ago (when the initial OmniOS news broke) I wrote more
about our needs here:

 https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/IllumosDistributionNeeds

Background on our fileserver environment is here:

 https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSFileserverSetupII

	- cks