There will be no LTS release of the OmniOS Community Edition

August 7, 2017

At the end of my entry on how I was cautiously optimistic about OmniOS CE, I said:

[...] For a start, it's not clear to me if OmniOS CE r151022 will receive long-term security updates or if users will be expected to move to r151024 when it's released (and I suppose I should ask).

Well, I asked, and the answer is a pretty unambiguous 'no'. The OmniOS CE core team has no interest in maintaining an LTS release; any such extended support would have to come from someone else doing the work. The current OmniOS CE support plans are:

What we intend, is to support the current and previous release with an emphasis on the current release going forward from r151022.

OmniOS CE releases are planned to come out roughly every 26 weeks, ie every six months, so supporting the current and previous release means that you get a nominal year of security updates and so on (in practice less than a year).

I can't blame the OmniOS CE core team for this (and I'm not anything that I'd describe as 'disappointed'; getting not just a OmniOS CE but a OmniOS CE LTS was always a long shot). People work on what interest them, and the CE core team just doesn't use LTS releases or plan to. They're doing enough as it is to keep OmniOS alive. And for most people, upgrading from release to release is probably not a big deal.

In the short term, this means that we are not going to bother to try to upgrade from OmniOS r151014 to either the current or the next version of OmniOS CE, because the payoff of relatively temporary security support doesn't seem worth the effort. We've already been treating our fileservers as sealed appliances, so this is not something we consider a big change.

(The long term is beyond the scope of this entry.)

Written on 07 August 2017.
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Last modified: Mon Aug 7 01:09:13 2017
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