Linux kernel version support policy

[Adam Conrad]

On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 02:46:44PM +0000, Joseph S. Myers wrote:
> 
> * general policy (my suggestion is that we default to not supporting 
> kernel versions not maintained upstream, unless we believe in a particular 
> case that there are important distribution versions using those kernels 
> that make it desirable to support using them);

I'm fine with the above general policy, so long as it derives input
from distro maintainers before the change, so we can debate the pros
and cons of supporting RHEL3, Debian Potato, etc.

Curretly, it seems we all pretty much agree on:

> * moving to requiring 2.6.32, the oldest currently-maintained kernel 
> series, for glibc 2.20 (release due July 2014)?

Given that most major distros have moved to a 2.6.32 baseline, this is
probably not particularly contentious, and I'm inclined to say that
users who run on crazy outdated OpenVZ setups can be well-served by
older distros like RHEL6, Ubuntu 12.04, etc, etc for quite a while.  We
can't support everyone's crazy platform problems forever.

... Adam