[yocto] Dropping Debian 7 as supported?

[Khem Raj]

On Sat, Feb 13, 2016 at 9:28 AM, Richard Purdie
<richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 2016-02-13 at 15:30 +0100, Jens Rehsack wrote:
>> > Am 11.02.2016 um 15:32 schrieb Burton, Ross <ross.burton at intel.com>
>> > :
>> >
>> >
>> > On 11 February 2016 at 14:21, Nick Leverton <nick at leverton.org>
>> > wrote:
>> > Possibly a little early - Debian 7 will be going onto LTS security
>> > support for
>> > two years, starting some time this month.  Quoting from
>> > https://wiki.debian.org/LTS
>> >
>> > Ah yes, I'd forgotten about the LTS project and was looking at the
>> > security team.
>> >
>> > This does make it less clear, but it's still an old release and we
>> > can't support/test on everything.
>>
>> Sure, but are there some serious/expensive maintaining efforts
>> continuing support Debian 7?
>> Or is it an approach to kick Debian from list of supported
>> distributions for (above?) reasons?
>>
>> Since I run some build instances on a Debian 7 machine which is not
>> going to be upgraded that
>> soon (don't want Debian 8, but don't want to reinstall from scratch
>> and migrate my Xen VM's ...),
>> dropping support for "it's just time to move on" is more a Desktop
>> philosophy, not for embedded/datacenter
>> approaches ...
>
> For example, we'd like to use the sparse option when building rootfs:
>
> https://bugzilla.yoctoproject.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9099
>
> This support isn't available in the version of dd in debian 7. Our
> options are:
>
> * Build a dd -native

For core feature like sparse files its better to control our own destiny
and use dd-native regardless. But that does not mean we should
not drop debian7 or arcane centos distros that we keep supporting for
ever. I still see patches for centos 5.8 in metadata.