dbus 1.8.x (and older): end-of-life announcement

[Simon McVittie]

dbus is the reference implementation of D-Bus, a message bus for
communication between applications and system services.

Until earlier this year, I was maintaining dbus 1.8.x security releases
for Debian 8. As a result of the end of mainstream security support for
Debian 8 in June[1], I am no longer intending to make these releases.
All older stable-branches (1.0.x, 1.2.x, 1.4.x, 1.6.x) have already been
unsupported for a while.

If you are a dbus downstream maintainer in a long-lived OS distribution
and you want to use the upstream dbus-1.8 git branch as a place to share
backported security fixes with other distributions, please contact the
dbus maintainers via the dbus-security at lists.freedesktop.org list.

I'm aware that this end-of-life point hasn't been formally announced
before, so I'd consider doing one more 1.8.x release collecting the
changes since 1.8.22 if that would be useful to OS distributors. Again,
please contact dbus-security at lists.freedesktop.org if this is something
you need.

As a reminder, odd-numbered development branches of dbus (1.1.x, 1.3.x,
etc.) do not have any security support. Security fixes applicable to
the current development branch (at the time of writing this is 1.13.x)
are released as part of normal development releases, which typically
also include feature work that might be destabilizing. Older development
branches are considered to have been superseded by the stable-branch
that followed them (for example 1.12.x replaces 1.11.x) and will not
receive any more releases at all. OS distributors should not use a
development branch unless they can promise that they will upgrade to the
stable-branch that follows it, for example moving from 1.13.x to 1.14.x
when 1.14.0 becomes available.

    smcv

[1] https://www.debian.org/News/2018/20180623

-- 
Simon McVittie, Collabora Ltd.
on behalf of the dbus maintainers