So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Dotdeb has provided packages for 17+ years, as useful additions to Debian releases, from Woody to Jessie. It all started when I was working for a Web-hosting company in France and when official backports did not exist or were not super active. I rapidly made it a personal project and I have taken great pride in publishing useful packages that have been deployed on thousands of machines over the years.

This ecosystem has come a long way and Debian developers are now doing a terrific job by providing official backports for slow-paced but rock solid Debian releases.

With Jessie being officially discontinued since June 2018 and its LTS support over since June 2020, Dotdeb has come to an end – as of June 30, 2020 – with the following consequences:

  • No new packages will be published (let’s be honest, it has been like this for a while 😕)
  • Existing packages will stay online for a while on https://packages.dotdeb.org/ and https://archives.dotdeb.org/ to avoid any disruption in the (shrinking) existing user base.
  • Mirrors won’t be monitored or supported anymore. The rsync server will be decommissioned.

On a personal note, I am now living in the SF Bay Area for several years, and I am a happy dad for a few months. My interest in the Debian / PHP / MySQL… communities is still strong but shifted too much to spend the same energy as before in maintaining Dotdeb. You may find some of my contributions in the “Cloud Native” ecosystem now.

I can’t thank you all enough for having used Dotdeb over all these years, for providing so much feedback and for your support with mirrors and donations 🙏🏻.

Take care, stay safe!

17 replies on “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish”

Thanks for your support all those years. Wish you a great future as a dad.

Thank you for providing this service!
These packages have been making my team’s life easier for some of these 17 years.

Wish you luck and patience being a dad !

I’m just migrating a client’s WordPress that was 10 years old. You saved me! Thank you for all the good work.

i make an article about comparing the work od DotDeb and Sury repos.. opuff . . your work are obviously superior respect and compared to the crap of sury that just said “i only package most newer and it works for me”

Thanks, I appreciate you comment.

But to his defense :

  • maintaining such a repo with many versions is super time-consuming
  • especially those you are not maintained anymore by the upstream project
  • and as a user, you can get the benefit of his work without spending a dime

So let’s try to be a bit constructive here 😅

Have you tried investigating the source of your segfault by installing debug symbols and getting a core dump?

Another option for you would be to use containers and well-maintained images that could fit your needs in terms of versions and modules.

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