Ah right yes, good point. Regular support for that OS is available for another seven months. I wonder how many users are in that predicament, or how many users are likely to pay the something like 750 dollars per server after the end of the seven months to receive the ESM.
LTS releases from Ubuntu have a life of about five years, meaning that 16.04 is about 90% of the way through its life.
Part of the difficulty of working in this culture is that I have absolutely no idea who is on what OS, how the software is being used in the field etc. We have some idea of node versions on the network from peer chatting with them but other than that we don’t collect any type of user statistics anonymized or otherwise that’s helpful in making these decisions.
In the absence of that and in the presence of knowing that many users of other products expect vendors to make sure they’re doing the right thing only by following our instructions, I haven’t yet found a way of support make a package compatible with Ubuntu 16.04 for the few months left in it’s regular security life.
Personally I would recommend moving from LTS version to LTS version on a regular cadence as part of normal system operations and maintenance.
There’s a thread going on about it internally though. I’ll come back here when we’ve got something concrete, probably closer to the time.
In the meantime my recommendation is to try to stay ahead of the deprecation curve and run an OS with more than a year left in its security updates, or perhaps adopt a new LTS version around a year after it is made available. That way there’s a buffer for testing etc… if there are problems.
