by the end LTS branches of the Debian 8 Jessie distribution, in 2015. The release of updates for the LTS branch was carried out by a separate group of developers , formed from enthusiasts and representatives of companies interested in the long-term supply of updates for Debian.
The initiative group has already begun to form a new LTS branch based on , which will end its native support on July 18, 2020. The LTS Team has taken over from the Security Team and will continue to support without interruption. The release of updates for Debian 9 will be extended until June 30, 2022 (later LTS support will be provided for Debian 10, updates for which will be released until 2024). As with Debian 8, LTS support for Debian 9 and Debian 10 will only cover the i386, amd64, armel, and armhf architectures, with a total support period of 5 years.
At the same time, the end of LTS support does not mean the end of the life cycle of Debian 8.0 - as part of the expanded program "Β» Freexian has expressed its readiness to release by June 30, 2022 on its own updates with the elimination of vulnerabilities in a limited set of packages for the amd64, armel and i386 architectures. Support will not cover packages such as Linux kernel 3.16 (will offer kernel 4.9, backported from Debian 9 "Stretch"), openjdk-7 (will offer openjdk-8), mariadb-10.0, libav and tomcat7 (maintenance will last until March 2021 ). Updates are distributed via external , maintained by Freexian. Access for everyone, and the range of supported packages depends on the total number of and the packages they are interested in.
Recall that Debian's short and unpredictable support period, which averaged three years and depended on the development of a new release, was one of the main obstacles to the adoption of Debian in enterprises. With the introduction of the LTS and Extended LTS initiatives, this obstacle has been removed and Debian's support time has been extended to seven years from the date of release, which is more than the five-year LTS releases of Ubuntu, but three years less than Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise, which are supported 10 years.
Source: opennet.ru