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Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

#181
post #112

HEADLINE Remove openssl1.0 DESCRIPTION stretch made OpenSSL 1.1 the default openssl package. Unfortunately, OpenSSL 1.0 was kept around, since so many things depended on it. There should now be enough time that a firm stance can be taken toward not allowing OpenSSL 1.0 in Debian Buster. Once TLS 1.3 is finalized, OpenSSL 1.2 will be released with TLS 1.3 support. Not supporting TLS 1.3 in buster would (in my opinion)…

How would you feel about a switch to one of the forks, such as BoringSSL or LibreSSL?

Sorry, I'm not in support of switching from OpenSSL to BoringSSL or LibreSSL as the default.

On a fairly regular basis, I use alot of the weirder things that I don't think BoringSSL or LibreSSL support.

For example, I was working on iOS profile stuff that called on OpenSSL's S/MIME enveloping functionality to make signed/encrypted profiles.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you dislike about systemd? Do you disagree with the ideas behind it, or is your discontentment more about the specific implementation of those ideas? Can you give examples?

Not the OP, but: - It's effectively a black box that nobody but the systemd team really understands; and the response by said team to problems with systemd too often defaults to "you're doing it wrong" - Systemd is not just an init system, it's a message bus, authentication system, logging system, container management system, xinitd system, and any other number of highly coupled systems. - Service startup order can s…

> - It's effectively a black box that nobody but the systemd team really understands; and the response by said team to problems with systemd too often defaults to "you're doing it wrong"

I'm seeing this attitude a lot. Just last week, at our Linux User Group meeting, someone brought in a notebook with Debian 9, which didn't boot up correctly because drives were not detected.

The issue turned out to be really simple (udevd is started after `udevadm trigger`, so device files do not get created), and I advised them to file a bugreport with Debian about this. But it still took over an hour to diagnose because everyone around me was bickering how impossible it was to diagnose anything with systemd, whereas I just looked at `systemd-analyze plot`, `journalctl` and poked around a bit.

So, not something that I would call opaque. It's just that they're not used to it. I never really learned inits before systemd (I knew how to enable and disable services on $distro, but that was about it).

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

#183
post #144

HEADLINE: Easier way to create local packages DESCRIPTION: My first distro was Debian. Then, for a while, I used Arch. But it kept irritating me with its total disregard for backwards-compatibility (symlinking /usr/bin/python to python3), coarse-grained packages (want to install QEMU PPC without pulling in every other architecture as well? too bad!), lack of debug packages (good luck rebuilding WebKit just to get sta…

How about checkinstall for making a quick and dirty package? :P

I've had very bad experience with checkinstall.

The idea seems perfectly sound, but the implementation needs a lot of work. The UI needs to be better (e.g. saving your answers to the questions about title, author, etc.) And there are also some straight up bugs. It has crashed for me many times. And not even for a sketchy program- I'm talking like llvm.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

#184
post #74

HEADLINE: easier, simpler package creation and building DESCRIPTION: on distros like arch, to a lesser extent void and even gentoo, writing package definition files (PKGBUILDs, ebuilds, templates) is relatively straightforward; in contrast, i don't even know where to start with finding, editing and building debian packages. i think they're built from source packages but beyond that i have no clue. i think visibility…

And if you dig down deep you'll find that Debian packages most of the time don't even support the features the manpages claim (e.g. building with debug info or custom CFLAG's)

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

#185
post #68

HEADLINE: enable AppArmor by default DESCRIPTION: AppArmor improves security by limiting the capabilities of programs. Ubuntu has done this years ago [1]. I'd like to see profiles for web browsers enabled by default. I think AppArmor is the right choice of default Mandatory Access Control for Debian because Ubuntu and security focused Debian derivatives like Tails [2] and SubgraphOS [3] have already committed to it.…

AppArmor is like SELinux though: it's annoying so people just turn it off. Most recent example I encountered was on Ubuntu 1604; I wanted to run VMs under QEMU/KVM with libvirt but AppArmor was preventing the VM from using a USB device from the host. Just by chance I took a look at dmesg and saw some audit message about qemu bridge helper.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

#186

HEADLINE Remove openssl1.0 DESCRIPTION stretch made OpenSSL 1.1 the default openssl package. Unfortunately, OpenSSL 1.0 was kept around, since so many things depended on it. There should now be enough time that a firm stance can be taken toward not allowing OpenSSL 1.0 in Debian Buster. Once TLS 1.3 is finalized, OpenSSL 1.2 will be released with TLS 1.3 support. Not supporting TLS 1.3 in buster would (in my opinion)…

Android Studio relies on OpenSSL 1.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

#187

HEADLINE: a merger of flatpkg and snap DESCRIPTION: a consensus on the next generation of package management. Please. We have had decades of fragmentation (not to mention duplicated innovation) around the RPM vs DEB ecosystem. Which is why it is still hard for beginners to want to use Linux - try explaining to anyone who comes from a Mac about rpm vs deb vs whatever else. Which is why they would pay for the mac rathe…

I don't think Debian needs to choose. Debian will keep using deb/dpkg as flatpak and snap are not intended to replace a distro's main packaging. They are supplements so users can get newer packages directly from upstream developers. Note that Debian 9 already supports both flatpak [1] and snap [2]. Because of the way snaps/flatpaks are isolated from the rest of the system, they can coexist without issues.

I thought the creators of snaps/flatpaks would be upstream developers, so they themselves will vote on the package management system by using either. There is no duplication of effort here.

Myself I prefer AppImage [3], because of its simplicity and the fact that they are already supported on all Linux distributions, without installing any explicit support.

[1]: https://packages.debian.org/stretch/flatpak

[2]: https://packages.debian.org/stretch/snapd

[3]: http://appimage.org

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

#188
- HEADLINE: port pledge(2) from OpenBSD

- DESCRIPTION: Debian has been a great source of innovation and leadership within the OSS world. Make the next big move by adopting pledge(2) from OpenBSD to be the first major mandatory security feature on Linux. There is little hassle in making programs use it, and the LOC in the kernel is tiny compared to say SELinux. See [1] for more details.

[1] http://www.openbsd.org/papers/hackfest2015-pledge/mgp00001.h...

- DISTRIBUTION: Any and all!

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: CS program analysis researcher with MIT/CSAIL.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

#189

- HEADLINE: Make it easier to use newer software. - DESCRIPTION: I think there is lots of ways. Things like flatpak look promising but also docker. It would be nice if there where less papercuts when using those things. I also dream about a command named "playground [name]" which instantly gives me a shell where I can try stuff without interfering with anything else. When finished I can just "playground remove [name]…

Shameless self-promotion: I've been working on building that playground command in my free time at https://github.com/zachlatta/try.

Maybe we could add support for Debian packages?

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

#190
- HEADLINE: Bring back the standard (console) Live CD

- DESCRIPTION: Jessie had a standard Live CD. While the HTML still refers to this flavor, it is not found on any mirror that I checked for Stretch.

I have to use the live CD to install ZFS on Root. I would prefer to not bother downloading or booting a desktop environment when I don't need one.

I don't know why it was removed, but the name was always strange to me. Name it textonly or expert or something so people don't choose it. Standard sounds like it is the recommended image.

- DISTRIBUTION: Live CD

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