The Debian security team announced that Debian 4.0 “Etch” security support will be ended on February 15th, 2010 :
Security Support for Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 to be discontinued on February 15th One year after the release of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 alias 'lenny' and nearly three years after the release of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 alias 'etch' the security support for the old distribution (4.0 alias 'etch') is coming to an end next month. The Debian project is proud to be able to support its old distribution for such a long time and even for one year after a new version has been released. The Debian project has released Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 alias 'lenny' on the 14th of February 2009. Users and Distributors have been given a one-year timeframe to upgrade their old installations to the current stable release. Hence, the security support for the old release of 4.0 is going to end in February 2010 as previously announced. Previously announced security updates for the old release will continue to be available on security.debian.org.
Then, Dotdeb will follow the Debian project and all the Etch packages will be moved to http://archives.dotdeb.org/ on Feb. 15th.
It is now time for you to upgrade your last servers from Etch to Lenny…
What’s next?
I’ll have to prepare the Squeeze release (planned on August 2010). The (early) plans ?
- Focus on high quality PHP 5.3 and MySQL 5.1+ packages
- More useful tools for your LAMP platforms : Gearman, Maatkit… MariaDB? Drizzle? Wait & see
- No more mail-realated packages (Qmail, Vpopmail, Courier, Dovecot, Vqadmin)