drop legacy support: stop supporting oldstable and older

[adrelanos]

#266 is one example of something difficult to implement due to old version support. That is versions older than Debian stable. Speak stable -1 (oldstable) or stable -2 (oldoldstable) or even older.

Legacy support is expensive.

Unless there is a specific reason to support anything older than stable, I would suggest to deprecate support for it. I would not know why I would want to use a recent version of grml-debootstrap to build an oldstable or older version of Debian.

If legacy support was dropped, then the source code could be simplified.

If this is a popular feature request that you wish to adhere or if you need it for some of your own purposes, that would be of course fine.

Sometimes behavior slips into a project, is then carried forward without anyone still knowing why this is the case while it might no longer be necessary. At the chance that this might be happening here, suggesting this.

[zeha]

Hi @adrelanos,

both @mika and me regularly use grml-debootstrap to boot older Debian versions.

I agree that it's a pain to support older versions, but I think we should keep the support.

From my PoV at least for buster. I think @mika also cares about jessie.

[mika]

Thanks for raising this, @adrelanos.

I agree that we should avoid having support for older Debian releases at all costs. I'm a fan of backwards and forwards compatibility, but also this has its limits and given that we have CI tests in grml-debootstrap, it makes sense to keep the build/test matrix somewhat sane(r). 8-)

So yeah, I would consider supporting releases until buster as well, and drop older releases.
Further opinions?

[adrelanos]

Time of writing this comment: Debian bookworm is stable.

Further opinions?

No further opinions have been posted since August 2024.

So yeah, I would consider supporting releases until buster as well, and drop older releases.

So buster it is? stretch is older than buster.

Can we drop stretch please? Because CI is failing with stretch.

• Arraybolt3/better grub efi Kicksecure/grml-debootstrap#1
  • in context of Make bootloader updates on UEFI-based systems work #299

[zeha]

Because CI is failing with stretch

That's formulated a bit backwards ;-)

From my PoV support for jessie + stretch can go away.