End-of-life plans for dbus 1.14.x

[Simon McVittie]

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

The current stable branch of dbus is 1.16.x, which started from 1.16.0 [1]
and is currently at 1.16.2 [2].

dbus 1.14.x is currently the "old stable" branch, with minimal bug fixes
only. As announced in [1], my intention is to keep applying security fixes
in dbus 1.14.x on an as-needed basis until the Debian 12 end-of-life in
mid 2026 [3], and then announce end-of-life for dbus 1.14.x.

All older branches such as 1.12.x and 1.10.x have already been announced
to be unsupported.

Odd-numbered development branches such as 1.15.x and 1.13.x are
unsupported. The next development branch will be 1.17.x, leading to a
1.18.0 stable release; there is no specific timeline planned for this.

[1] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dbus/2024-December/018496.html
[2] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dbus/2025-February/018505.html
[3] no specific date has been announced, it will be approximately a year
    after the release of Debian 13 (which has not yet happened)

-- 
Simon McVittie, Collabora Ltd. / Debian
on behalf of the dbus maintainers <dbus-security at lists dot freedesktop dot org>