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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”)?

#211

Post by vacri »

warp wrote: post #200

HEADLINE: faster release cycle DESCRIPTION: In the past I've often ran into stuff in Debian just being too old for my needs. I don't need the bleeding edge, but two years is a really long time. I've switched to Ubuntu a few years ago, but not being a fan of Canonical it would be nice if I could come back to Debian. DISTRIBUTION: stable ROLE: full stack web developer

Use Debian Unstable on the desktop, and Debian Stable on the server. Despite the name, Unstable is pretty stable - it's just making it clear that you're dealing with relatively fresh packages and these often break as they're not battle-tested.

Unstable isn't built from bleeding-edge nightlies, but it's generally up-to-date.

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

#212

Post by izacus »

pwdisswordfish wrote: post #89

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…

Hmm, I usually use checkinstall for that and it worked rather decently for building quick-and-dirty .DEB packages used locally. Did you try it yet?

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

#213

Post by CJefferson »

pwdisswordfish wrote: post #89

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…

Really +1. There are some programs I work on that I wanted to package for debian, but after a full day of no progress I gave up and threw my hands in the air.

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

#214

Post by kurgan »

HEADLINE: No Systemd

DESCRIPTION: Systemd is creating far more issues than benfits. Everyone knows it except for its author, L. P. Still Debian has chosen to go down this road, and the result is that people had to fork and to move to Devuan. Go back to a sane, simple, stable init system. This is expecially true for a server-oriented distribution.

ROLE: Fabio Muzzi, freelance linux sysadmin since 1995, loyal Debian user up to Debian 7, now Devuan user and supporter.

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

#215

Post by kpcyrd »

HEADLINE: Decent rust support

DESCRIPTION: On rolling release distros there's currently a vim version that ships rust syntax highlighting, rustc and cargo. This is pretty much all you need to get started with rust development. Debian stable currently ships rustc, but lacks cargo, which is rather essential if you actually want to compile your project on a debian server. The vim-syntax thing would be nice to have. :)

DISTRIBUTION: stable/stable-backports

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

#216

Post by _delirium »

bodhammer wrote: post #178

- HEADLINE: Support for LXD (And LXC 2.0) - DESCRIPTION: XD isn't a rewrite of LXC, in fact it's building on top of LXC to provide a new, better user experience. Under the hood, LXD uses LXC through liblxc and its Go binding to create and manage the containers. It's basically an alternative to LXC's tools and distribution template system with the added features that come from being controllable over the network. - DI…

LXD is being worked on and should be available in unstable soon (and then subsequently in the next stable release). More info here: https://wiki.debian.org/LXD

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

#217

Post by rlpb »

miclill wrote: post #147

- HEADLINE: Not start services by default - DESCRIPTION: If I installed e.g. postgresql I would prefer it not starting automatically by default. I would rather like a message: If you want x to start on boot, type 'update-rc.d enable x' - DISTRIBUTION: (Optional) [stable] - ROLE/AFFILIATION: (software dev, mostly web)

You can configure this behaviour today. Search for "policy-rc.d". IMHO, it's a bug in configuration management tools that they do not arrange this by default.

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

#218

Post by captainmuon »

HEADLINE: Keep selected packages up-to-date on stable

DESCRIPTION: If you are using Debian, especially stable, you have to put up with outdated packages. This is especially a problem with browsers, although you do include security updates and track Firefox ESR, if I understand correctly. But things like Webkitgtk do not recieve updates, and lack feature and security wise after a while.

I think keeping up-to-date versions and having a stable distribution is not per se a conflict. Stable means to me no breaking changes, no need for reconfiguration when I update. It shouldn't mean frozen in time.

It would be great if certain packages would recieve frequent updates even in stable:

- packages that are not dependencies, have a good track record of backwards compatibility, and are unlikely to break

- packages that have to be updated because of security issues (which I think is already addressed now)

- or because of a fast moving ecosystem - even if it was safe, it is frustrating to use a very outdated browser component. I think many networked packages could fit in this category, e.g. Bittorrent or Tor clients, if there are protocol changes.

I think the situation has improved a lot (https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2017/06/15/debian-stretch...), and it would be great to have a stable basis in future and still have up-to-date applications on top as far as possible.

DISTRIBUTION: stable (but also others)

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

#219

Post by lloeki »

kebolio wrote: 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…

Indeed. Typical scenario, I have software X that can follow such a process:

    tar xfvz foo
    cd foo
    ./configure --prefix aze
    make
    make install DEST_DIR=qsd
I want to package this to save build and deploy time as well as increase reliability. It should be downright trivial to:

    1. find the info explaining me how to do this
    2. understand it
    3. effectively do this
Debian fails even starting with step 1. Even if you manage to go through step 2 with some hair left, step 3 is insane compared to the mentioned alternatives.

This does not even involve step 4 (contributing the package back if it's not for internal use)

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

#220

Post by 0xelectron »

LukaD wrote: post #35
JoshTriplett wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just a recognition of the existence of that particular quirk of Arch, and that people may need to cope with that. It's remarkably painful, in practice, to deal with the one special distribution that makes "#!/usr/bin/python" do the wrong thing. And unfortunately, some other distributions don't have a "python2" or "python3" binary, making it painful to write portable scripts; you can't write "#!/usr/bin/python2…

Arch has had python2 and python3 binaries for a long time. /usr/bin/python2 has been there since at least 2010 https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/commit/trunk...

Yes but not the other distributions. Which makes it difficult to write portable scripts.
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