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

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

#1

Post by lamby »

Hey,

Chris Lamb here, Debian Project Leader. As a bit of background, I've been around the "startup" scene on and off, even participating in YCombinator during S12. I have a few side projects here and there and I also do a lot of full-stack web development using Python/Django.

I'm very much interested in soliciting your feedback and feature requests for the Debian 10 ("buster") development cycle which opens up tomorrow after the release of "stretch" today. This is obviously a shameless appropriation of Ubuntu's post a few months ago and some requests would definitely overlap but I feel we could get some interesting replies nonetheless.

Please include in your replies the following bullets:

- HEADLINE: 1-line description of the request

- DESCRIPTION: A lengthier description of the feature. Bonus points for constructive criticism...

- DISTRIBUTION: (Optional) [stable, testing, unstable, or even a Debian deriviative]

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: (Optional, your job role and affiliation)

We would be exteremely interested in your feedback! Everything is fair game -- kernel, security, community, default settings, architectures, init systems (!), desktop, Docker, documentation, default packages, cloud images, etc. etc.. Feel free to comment even if you are using a Debian derivative such as Ubuntu, Mint, etc. too.

Thanks, HN!

—lamby

https://twitter.com/lolamby

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

#2

Post by Dunedan »

HEADER

Python 3 as default

DESCRIPTION

Just to quote from the packaging manual:

> Debian currently supports two Python stacks, one for Python 3 and one for Python 2. The long term goal for Debian is to reduce this to one stack, dropping the Python 2 stack at some time.

The first step for that would be of course Python 3 as default Python version and I'd like to see that for buster, as Python 3 nowadays offers way more features than Python 2 and should be the choice for new Python projects.

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

#3

Post by brian_herman »

HEADLINE

Secure Boot in Stable

DESCRIPTION

UEFI Secure Boot Support in Debian.

Debian does not run on systems with Secure Boot enabled.

DISTRIBUTION

stable/buster

ROLE

I work at an insurance company and all of our development computers and most of our servers run debian jessie.

We will probably upgrade to Debian 9 very soon! Thanks for all the hard work on debian Iamby!

EDIT: grammar and formatting

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

#5

Post by Dunedan »

HEADER

100% reproducible packages

DESCRIPTION

While having over 90% of packages reproducible already is awesome, 100% would be even better. The stretch release announcement describes best why:

> Thanks to the Reproducible Builds project, over 90% of the source packages included in Debian 9 will build bit-for-bit identical binary packages. This is an important verification feature which protects users from malicious attempts to tamper with compilers and build networks.

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

#6

Post by rkv »

HEADLINE: Stabilize dpkg C library (libdpkg)

DESCRIPTION: Any plans to go ahead and stabilize the dpkg library for buster? Having access to a stable package management library is essential in our software. Ie. being able to verify package signatures and querying the database for files. Both of which are not supported.

DISTRIBUTION: buster

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

#7

Post by beefhash »

HEADLINE

First-class init that is not systemd

DESCRIPTION

I believe it's notorious that systemd is highly controversial, even spinning off a fork called Devuan. It might be more favorable to reunite the community by including one alternative init system that is, fundamentally, a first-class citizen in the Debian ecosystem.

"First-class" implies that the user is given a choice on new installations in a specified prompt. The default should be the option "systemd (recommended)".

DISTRIBUTION

buster+1 given the expected effort

ROLE/AFFILIATION

Individual and hobbyist system administrator

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

#8

Post by thaumasiotes »

Dunedan wrote: post #4

HEADER Wayland as default display server DESCRIPTION X11 is aging, so it's time to switch to Wayland. It'd be cool if buster would ship with Wayland as default display server.

> X11 is aging, so it's time to switch to Wayland

I can't say I follow the logic. Wayland is aging too, but I assume you wouldn't be on board with the idea "Wayland is aging, so it's time to switch back to X11"?

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

#9

Post by problems »

Dunedan wrote: post #2

HEADER Python 3 as default DESCRIPTION Just to quote from the packaging manual: > Debian currently supports two Python stacks, one for Python 3 and one for Python 2. The long term goal for Debian is to reduce this to one stack, dropping the Python 2 stack at some time. The first step for that would be of course Python 3 as default Python version and I'd like to see that for buster, as Python 3 nowadays offers way mor…

But ultimately isn't the first choice for most Python projects to date. So many scripts have python paths expecting python 2 hardcoded and pretty much everything that wants python3 calls python3. I'm firmly against this for compatibility reasons, it breaks too much.

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

#10

Post by JoshTriplett »

beefhash wrote: post #7

HEADLINE First-class init that is not systemd DESCRIPTION I believe it's notorious that systemd is highly controversial, even spinning off a fork called Devuan. It might be more favorable to reunite the community by including one alternative init system that is, fundamentally, a first-class citizen in the Debian ecosystem. "First-class" implies that the user is given a choice on new installations in a specified promp…

Debian is already one of the few distributions that goes out of its way to provide support for non-systemd init systems. Beyond that, it would help if a non-systemd init system as capable as systemd existed; if one did, I'm sure that Debian would include it and support it. This is a case where the problem isn't "please package and support", it's "please develop".
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