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

A lot of people still use sysvinit and it just works.

DESCRIPTION: The wiki is frequently stale or incomplete. A lot of people get information much more readily out of a wiki than mailing lists. Like me, for example :) Mailing lists have a very high latency (often infinite) and can be difficult to search.

For example, say you want to host your own apt repo to hold a custom package; this page is not very clear https://wiki.debian.org/DebianRepository/Setup - how do you choose which of all the software types to use? It's a reasonable software overview, but not great to help people get a repo set up.

Arch has a fantastic wiki that's clear and concise. It's also more readable (mediawiki) than Debian format, though I understand Debian aims to work as bare html for greater device compatibility.

DISTRIBUTION: Primarily Stable, with later sections for non-stable if needed.

ROLE: sysadmin

And some WiFi cards works out of the box with Debian? Is that because the manufacturers of those cards provided the source of their firmware or because open source alternatives have been written by somebody else?

At any rate, it was an honest question. I'm not familiar with any salient reasons to not use git. If the only reason is that some developers still haven't learned git yet, I guess that's an answer. Not a very satisfying one to me, but it's worth knowing that's the reason.

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 stack traces after a SIGSEGV), and package versioning ignoring ABI incompatibilities (I once managed to disable the package manager by upgrading it without also upgrading its dependencies... and later cut off WiFi in a similar manner). So, when I finally trashed my root partition a few weeks ago, I decided to use the opportunity to return to Debian.

One thing I miss from Arch, though, is having an easy way to create a package. It's simply a matter of reading one manpage, writing a shellscript with package metadata in variables and two-to-four functions (to patch up the unpacked source, check the version, build it, and finally create a tarball), and then running `makepkg`. And it will just download the source code, check signatures, patch it, and build it in one step; it even supports downloading and building packages straight from the development repository. I took advantage of it to create locally-patched versions of some software I use, while keeping it up to date and still under the package manager's control.

Contrast that with creating a .deb, where doing the equivalent seems to require invoking several different utilities (uscan, dch, debuild; though ) and keeping track of separate files like debian/control, debian/changelog, debian/rules and whatever else. All the tooling around building packages seems oriented towards distro maintainers rather than users. I'd love something that would relieve me of at least some of the burden of creating a local package from scratch.

DISTRIBUTION: unstable, I guess