Comment by ryandrake

I can only dream, but this may re-popularize (among the rest of the non-Debian software industry) the general best practice of keeping a "sustaining" branch green, buildable, and with frequent releases, for security fixes.

I hate software that forces you to take new features as a condition of obtaining bug and security fixes. We need to keep old "stable" builds around for longer and maintain them better. I know, I know, it is really upsetting to developers to have to backport things to old versions--they wish that all they had to work on was the current branch. But that just causes guys like me to never upgrade because the downside of upgrading (new features) is worse than the upside (security fixes).