Re: Dropping live image generation and testing for oldstable ?

On Sat, 10 Jan 2026 at 23:42:45 +0100, Chris Hofstaedtler wrote:
>I might be mistaken, but I think point releases can remove packages, 
>like old kernels.

They can.

>That would remove the corresponding sources. And 
>then for DFSG reasons, the old live images also need to be stop being 
>distributed.

Old live images are kept already, for example in 
<https://cdimage.debian.org/images/archive/12.12.0-live/amd64/>; but 
that doesn't seem to be a DFSG or license-compliance problem, because 
their corresponding source code is also kept, in for example 
<https://cdimage.debian.org/images/archive/12.12.0-live/source/tar/>.

Concretely, if we stopped generating live images for oldstable, then we 
wouldn't have produced bookworm images for 12.12 or attempted to produce 
bookworm images for 12.13 (because those point releases were done after 
bookworm was already oldstable), but as long as the source for the 
subset of 12.11 that goes into those images was also kept, that isn't a 
license problem.

(I think the release team and/or ftp team also keep the source code of 
all post-release updates to each stable release, but I could be wrong.)

     smcv