dev <devuan.2@???> wrote:

> I mention all this becuase I took the "deb 8" pinning challenge today
> and it failed miserably.

I tried something similar not long ago. It "almost" worked except that one component of Clamav that the server in question needs has a dependency on libsystemd0. The response from the Debian packaging team was "not helpful".

> I have around 40 Ubuntu 12.04 LTS machines in production. They
> all need to be upgraded before April of 2017 when security patches
> become deprecated. I don't know if Devuan will be 1.0 stable by
> then but completely understand the complexity of the task at hand
> considering the tentacular and insidious reach of systemd. Our
> current plan is to go to 14.04 LTS where there is hopefully a
> minimum of systemd invasion, but any hope for a "Debian" pinning
> solution is certainly lost.

I've somewhat less systems than that, mostly Debian Wheezy - and I have much the same situation regarding "supported" status and updates.

> Do not let BS comments like "an operative overreaction" discourage your efforts.


+1



Jaromil <jaromil@???> wrote:

> However what I really wanted to say is that you can count on the fact
> Devuan 1.0 will be out and stable well before April 2017.

That's good to hear.

> BTW If there is a company that can step up and support some of the
> work being done with a sponsorship ...

That brings me to something I've been meaning to ask for a while. Is there anything practical I can do to help ?

I can't offer anything through work*, or reasonably anything using company resources - so I couldn't slip a server in without the bandwidth being noticed. And my technical skills aren't that great either, and outside of work I have very little spare time due to the "DIY stuff" I have on for the next year or two.
When I get sorted (IT wise, at home), I might be able to offer some bandwidth from home (mirror ?) - I have a VDSL2 service with about 15Mbps outbound & unmetered.
I realise I'm probably no different to anyone else - no time, no money :-(

* I work in a very MS/Windows centric shop - the sort of place where no-one sees anything wrong with the "you upgrade when we tell you" approach in Windows 10, or the data slurping it has built in, or the "opaque black box" it offers to sysadmins. The GNU/Linus stuff I run is mostly the support stuff (routers, DNS, Mail, Monitoring) and a couple of web servers because they run PHP stuff (Wordpress) "easier" than Windows. And all running on hand me downs as the Windows guys have upgraded to more grunt to run their bloatware :-)