[systemd-devel] systemd-stable and Debian's systemd release strategy

[Simon McVittie]

On Wed, 18 Jan 2023 at 16:57:05 +0100, Michael Biebl wrote:
> backports: mostly me lacking time

Also, a note for those who might be less familiar with Debian: the
backports policy is that Debian 11 backports (bullseye-backports)
should always be in sync with the version that would be in Debian 12
(bookworm) if we released Debian 12 today, and similar for other pairs
of Debian versions. We don't backport different upstream versions unless
there are exceptional circumstances.

If Debian 12 was released today, it would contain systemd 252.4-1,
therefore when someone has time to update bullseye-backports, the only
correct thing to update it with would be a backport of that version, as
252.4-1~bpo11+1 (or a backport of whatever newer version has gone into
bookworm by then, if any). There will not be any more 251.x versions
in Debian now that we have picked up 252.x.

The only versions that get special treatment (and will either pick up
releases from systemd-stable or backported bug fixes, depending what
the maintainers are able to justify to the release managers) are the
versions that were current at the time of each Debian stable release
freeze, meaning 247.x for Debian 11, and most likely 252.x for Debian 12.

    smcv
    (not a Debian systemd maintainer, but I do maintain other packages
    that get updated in stable releases)