Determine whether the "universe" repository is supported on LTS releases

[tabbott]

Evan recently did some preliminary investigation into what exactly Ubuntu's "supported on the desktop for 3 years" LTS guarantee means. As far as he has been able to tell, it is possible that this does not include support for packages in "universe".

Since openafs is in the "universe" repository, this might mean something for long-term Debathena support of old releases.

[broder]

If you want to figure out what "supported on desktops" and "supported on servers" means in the context of an LTS release, you can try to dereference packages according to  http://people.ubuntu.com/~ubuntu-archive/germinate-output/ubuntu.hardy/structure and the other files in that directory.

But...packages in universe and multiverse were never Supported By Canonical to begin with - they are entirely community supported. That goes for LTS releases, too - at any point while a release is still supported (both the first 18 months and the rest of the LTS period), it's at the "community's" (i.e. motu-sru's) discretion to decide what updates go through.

For security updates, it seems that it's always the responsibility of the community to generate patches, but the Ubuntu security team handles the security release process. There, too, they seem to be fairly generous about taking updates from the community, regardless of how supported the release is.

See, for instance, LP 356861, where Kees seems to have effectively approved the security update for Dapper