Consider Debian LTS as supported

[bastelfreak]

In the past we agreed on not supporting Debian LTS versions, only the standard versions (and I know that I was one of the people that pushed for not supported LTS back then). Debian 11 switched from standard to LTS on 2024-08-15. There are still requests from users to support Debian 11 and I think with the slow response from Puppet about new debian packages it makes sense to reconsider it.

Please respond with 👍 if you agree or with 👎 if you think we shouldn't support the LTS versions. When we've some feedback we can merge this PR or close it.

[ekohl]

As I've said in private, I view Vox Pupuli as a collective of people who make sure they can do what they need. we're limited on the time we have and the reason I supported active removal of older code was to reduce maintenance burden. All in order to save time. If you actively want to support Debian 11 and put in the effort to make that happen, I'm all in favor of it.

The same goes for other cases. As long as it's reasonable (so don't ask for Puppet 3 support) and doesn't put a big burden on other maintainers then I'm open to it.

[jay7x]

I'd announce this as a best effort exception for now, so nobody would expect the same in the future just in case

[bastelfreak]

Indeed, all the operating systems we "support" are best effort.

[b4ldr]

I support this move but want to ask what this means for the puppet versions we support. For instance the current LTS version, buster, is using puppet 5.5 support for which was removed from the voxpupuli modules long ago. Or is the stance that we only support debian LTS with the perforce provided packages?

[bastelfreak]

@b4ldr thanks for raising this. My understanding is that for distributions where Perforce offers AIO packages, we only support those. But I realize that we probably never explicitly wrote that down. I will try to come up with something in another PR.

At the moment, our beaker jobs all rely on AIO packages, where available. For Ubuntu 24.04 and Debian 12 we started with the distro packages because Perforce was a bit slow with packages. BUT as soon as they were available, we switched to them.

This is the list of all operating systems and the date until we start beaker jobs for them: https://github.com/voxpupuli/puppet_metadata/blob/master/lib/puppet_metadata/operatingsystem.rb

And here we list all systems with AIO packages: https://github.com/voxpupuli/puppet_metadata/blob/master/lib/puppet_metadata/aio.rb