URL: https://github.com/SSSD/sssd/pull/408 Title: #408: Backport of PR#275 to SSSD-1.14
akamensky commented: """
I'm quite fine with backporting it to 1.14 because it will soon become unsupported branch by upstream (the same as branches older then 1-13).
On a good day I would be against doing even that. As per semver these changes technically should not go to any earlier version.
As I mentioned we manage quite a variety of systems, which are not _our_ systems, but we manage them. Thus we are not in control of what distribution or version it is.
SSSD is moving forward very fast, which is a good thing I believe and I wish it can keep doing so. However many other tools are not moving so fast. Which creates a situation where many systems (not only our systems but from my experience of doing this job for quite awhile most of the systems on the planet) are seriously behind. Yes, I wish everyone was on EL7 already, but in fact we only have about 2-3% of systems which are el7, most are for legacy reasons still on el6 (and a few are even el5, but let's disregard those). And that is for RHEL, there is also Debian and Ubuntu systems with the same problem. ALL except 1 of our Ubuntu customers are 14.04, which doesn't even have more recent 1.13 SSSD, and even 1.13 is not going to build there. We so far have only 1 customer with 16.04, which is going to build only 1.13 (any newer is out of the question there unless I want to build half of the system in my own repos). And not to mention Amazon Linux and Aliyun Linux which are outright "cronenbergs" of what should have been rhel6.
Unfortunately maintainers of packages on these systems do not want to introduce newer versions of packages easily, which means recent versions of SSSD won't make it to repositories or won't even build there (e.g. Ubuntu 16.04, only 1.13 branch builds there anything newer is out of the question due to many deps). However those maintainers do update packages on a patch releases which is what going to happen with all backports to 1.13 and 1.14 branches.
I am not so sure what is actually going to be policy for RHEL6, but AFAIK Centos6 will take any new release of 1.13 branch into updates repository (Centos6 still supported until 2020 as far as I recall). Ubuntu has a PPA for 16.04 with 1.13 branch in it, which I believe will also get updated (same is for Debian). Same comes for cronenbergs of cloud computing - they even moved on to 1.14, and they will include this update eventually if it is released.
As I mentioned in the beginning, I usually would not try to introduce new functionality in backports as that is only logical, but given the above and also the fact that these changes are not introducing any new dependencies (and in fact use so little of dependencies that it easily can be backported to 1.13), so I would like to give it a shot :)
Finally, I think I should not be pushing it too much as I know dev team is quite busy making a release and working on other tickets, which is a great thing, so I with the above concerns already expressed I will leave it for your consideration """
See the full comment at https://github.com/SSSD/sssd/pull/408#issuecomment-338195179