How long are Debian stable releases supported? like Debian Wheezy

debian distribution-choice distros support-cycle

8,892

Solution 1

There is no set date. From the Debian Wiki:

oldstable is a codename for the previous Debian stable repository, as long as security updates are provided. It is not just a name of the old stable version(s) of Debian.
...
Q) How long will security updates be provided?

The security team tries to support a stable distribution for about one year after the next stable distribution has been released, except when another stable distribution is released within this year. It is not possible to support three distributions; supporting two simultaneously is already difficult enough.

This means that Wheezy will be supported for about one year after Jessie's release. At the time of writing, there has been no set date for Jessie's release.

Solution 2

As discussed the Debian releases are supported for about 3 years, then one year after the next stable release as shown here: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases

There is now a LTS repository of Debian which you can swap over to get 5 years out of a release, ref: https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/

The LTS repo takes Debian 7 "Wheezy" support to May, 2018 & "Jessie" to May, 2020.

8,892

Salman

Hi there! I'm Syed Salman Ali I'm a computer guy with a strong focus on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), Information Security and Research. I'm passionate about properly designed, written and secured applications. If you are looking for an experienced person to create a new application, to fix security holes into an existing application, or to find out and make sure your application is secure or not then we should get in touch!

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Salman over 1 year

I am Ubuntu user; while I know that Ubuntu 12.04 is LTS and will be supported until April 2017, I'd like to know what the projected support lifetime of Debian Wheezy will be.
- Admin over 10 years
  
  DebianReleases
- Admin over 10 years
  
  It would be better if the question be rephrased to be more general like “How long are Debian releases supported?”. In a few months the answers which are correct now will be invalidated and in a few years no one cares about Wheezy any more.
jordanm over 10 years

They announced the freeze to be Nov 5th 2014 recently. I would expect a release between May-June 2015.