[Swan-dev] idea for libreswan LTS

[Harald Jenny]

Dear list members,

as I consider myself involved in both upstream and Debian libreswan
activities I want to propose something which I think will be a very
valuable addon to current libreswan development: The creation of an LTS
branch. The previous main problem of openswan was that certain bug and
security fixes were introduced by new upstream releases which needed to
be backported to the versions shipped in the various stable Linux
distributions. My idea would be to create a Long Term Support branch
which would be guaranteed to get bug and security fixes (maybe also
smaller feature enhancements) with as little code changes as possible.
The main objective here would be on one hand minimizing the maintaince
overhead for the package maintainers of the various Distributions while
on the other hand allowing their users an easy installation of a stable
and secure software (for some people using RedHat or Ubuntu LTS it may
just not be an alternative to upgrade IPSec to the newest available
version while some newbie linux user may not even know how to compile a
software from source). I know this may be a very controversial issue so
I want to put this to discussion on this list, so I ask everybody to
share his/her opinion on this matter.

Kind regards
Harald Jenny