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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”)?

#21

Post by lamby »

Dunedan wrote: post #5

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 a…

We're working on it, we're working on it! I definitely plan for buster to be 100% reproducible.

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

#22

Post by lamby »

brian_herman wrote: post #3

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

> Thanks for all the hard work on debian Iamby!

Oh wow, it's really not just me...

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

#23

Post by lamby »

feikname wrote: post #12

HEADLINE WiFi-direct GUI DESCRIPTION Using WiFi direct on most debian-based distros is a hassle, requiring a lot of manual terminal work. A GUI in the network section for WiFi Direct would make connections easier and faster.

Is there an existing such feature in other distributions out of interest?

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

#25

Post by Dunedan »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #11
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…

Upstream Python specifically recommends against installing Python 3 as /usr/bin/python; see PEP 394 at https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/ . Beyond that, many of Debian's python-using packages are already migrating over, and I'd expect the rest to likely migrate in buster.

To quote from the abstract of PEP394:

> * for the time being, all distributions should ensure that python refers to the same target as python2 .

> * however, end users should be aware that python refers to python3 on at least Arch Linux (that change is what prompted the creation of this PEP), so python should be used in the shebang line only for scripts that are source compatible with both Python 2 and 3.

> * in preparation for an eventual change in the default version of Python, Python 2 only scripts should either be updated to be source compatible with Python 3 or else to use python2 in the shebang line.

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

#26

Post by manquer »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #8
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"?

I guess OP is implying it is aging architecturally, technical debt and other perceived problems with X11 which prompted the development of wayland/mir

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

#27

Post by JoshTriplett »

rxlim wrote: post #20
JoshTriplett wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means that you can install sysvinit or any sysvinit-compatible init, and all daemon packages still provide init scripts, as painful as that is. And Debian still supports installing systemd-shim instead of systemd, so you can have a desktop system with a non-systemd init and it'll still function. > In practice it's not possible because of so many (unecessary) dependencies on systemd. Such as? As far as I can tell,…

The amount of work that goes into Devuan for pulling out systemd of Debian Jessie is clear evidence that what you are saying is not easily possible.

As I understand it, much of that work goes into removing any trace of even innocuous things like libsystemd, which is used by applications that want to support systemd if available. All the necessary work to support a non-systemd init is already in Debian, making Devuan fairly pointless in practice.

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

#28

Post by JoshTriplett »

Dunedan wrote: post #25
JoshTriplett wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upstream Python specifically recommends against installing Python 3 as /usr/bin/python; see PEP 394 at https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/ . Beyond that, many of Debian's python-using packages are already migrating over, and I'd expect the rest to likely migrate in buster.

To quote from the abstract of PEP394: > * for the time being, all distributions should ensure that python refers to the same target as python2 . > * however, end users should be aware that python refers to python3 on at least Arch Linux (that change is what prompted the creation of this PEP), so python should be used in the shebang line only for scripts that are source compatible with both Python 2 and 3. > * in prep…

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" or "#!/usr/bin/python3" and expect it to work on every distribution out there.

As mentioned, Debian is working on migrating scripts to support Python 3, and doing so using /usr/bin/python3 , which already appears in the shebang of a large number of Debian's Python programs.

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

#29

Post by tobias12345 »

rxlim wrote: post #20
JoshTriplett wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means that you can install sysvinit or any sysvinit-compatible init, and all daemon packages still provide init scripts, as painful as that is. And Debian still supports installing systemd-shim instead of systemd, so you can have a desktop system with a non-systemd init and it'll still function. > In practice it's not possible because of so many (unecessary) dependencies on systemd. Such as? As far as I can tell,…

The amount of work that goes into Devuan for pulling out systemd of Debian Jessie is clear evidence that what you are saying is not easily possible.

Devuan is evidence that stupid people have stupid priorities.

Devuan spends a lot of time and energy to remove libsystemd, a library that is introduced so that software can function properly with or without systemd. Not necessary for Devuan, true, but why not remove critical services shipped by systemd first? They still ship systemd-free.

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