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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”)?

#121

Post by pwdisswordfish »

JdeBP wrote: post #59
ZenoArrow wrote: post #44

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?

beefhash's explicitly stated rationale was reuniting the community . By attempting to derail this into yet another massive thread about the merits/demerits of systemd, rather than a discussion of the desired future and already present capabilities of the Debian installer , and putting words into beefhash´s mouth that xe did not say as you have done here, you are instigating exactly the opposite. * http://uselessd.dar…

> http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/

Dead link. Copy: http://archive.fo/5Gx8C

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

#122

Post by whbboyd »

avar wrote: post #105
joeyh wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, those do contain the firmware. https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/kernel/firmware-nonfree.git

I see that I mixed up two of my laptops in my example. You're right, but my general feature request still stands. Yes the iwlwifi firmware in particular is shipped on the nonfree firmware CD image. But the firmware my other laptop isn't. With the stretch rc5 non-free image mounted: $ dpkg -c firmware/firmware-iwlwifi_20161130-3_all.deb|grep -c ucode 46 But instead of providing the b43 firmware there's only a network…

Blame Broadcom for that; the b43 firmware may not legally be redistributed, so the only legal option is the fwcutter.

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

#123

Post by s_kilk »

jancsika wrote: post #116

- HEADLINE: transactional upgrades and package installs - DESCRIPTION: This is a feature of the guix package manager. From their website: "Each invocation is actually a transaction: either the specified operation succeeds, or nothing happens. Thus, if the guix package process is terminated during the transaction, or if a power outage occurs during the transaction, then the user’s profile remains in its previous state…

Fedora/RHEL also has transactional package operations via their package-manager, `dnf`.

One of the reasons I'd prefer not to go back to apt-based distros.

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

#124

Post by heftysync »

HEADLINE: First class ZFS install support on Live CD.

DESCRIPTION: The license conflict between the open source ZFS and open source Linux kernel mean ZFS needs to be in contrib. Unlike a lot of other packages in contrib, ZFS doesn't rely on any non-free software. It just can't be in Debian main because of the conflict of licenses.

However, it would be nice if there was a way to have a more official path to ZFS on root for Debian. The current instructions require a fairly high number of steps in the ZFS On Linux wiki.

The ZFS On Linux wiki also lists a new initramfs file that has to be included so ZFS is supported. It seems odd that Debian couldn't include that as part of initramfs. I realize Debian doesn't want to necessarily promote non-free software, but this is free software that just conflicts with the GPL. It doesn't seem like it should be a second class citizen where you have to manually include files that should already be part of the package.

By the nature of the license conflict, it will be a second class citizen in that it can't be part of the normal installation package and you'll have to compile on the fly. However, it would be nice if there was a mode in the Live CD that could handle ZFS installation rather than doing it all manually.

DISTRIBUTION: currently mixture of testing/unstable but I'd like to use day(s) old sid (see other post).

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

#125

Post by heftysync »

CaliforniaKarl wrote: post #31

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)…

OpenSSL doesn't follow semantic versioning. This is not a simple version upgrade. They knowingly broke the API between 1.0 and 1.1 and it can require substantial changes. They also refused to provide a compatibility shim to make it easier for developers to migrate.

This is not a Debian problem. This is an OpenSSL problem where they forced each upstream program author to make changes in order to upgrade. You'll have to wait for each upstream program author to update.

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

#127

Post by jancsika »

s_kilk wrote: post #123
jancsika wrote: post #116

- HEADLINE: transactional upgrades and package installs - DESCRIPTION: This is a feature of the guix package manager. From their website: "Each invocation is actually a transaction: either the specified operation succeeds, or nothing happens. Thus, if the guix package process is terminated during the transaction, or if a power outage occurs during the transaction, then the user’s profile remains in its previous state…

Fedora/RHEL also has transactional package operations via their package-manager, `dnf`. One of the reasons I'd prefer not to go back to apt-based distros.

Thanks, I didn't know that.

Does Fedora also have transactional rollbacks?

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

#128

Post by catdog »

TekMol wrote: post #85
kebolio wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

firmware support involves supplying the binary blobs that the driver needs to upload to certain peripherals like intel wireless cards. personally i would like to see non-free software kept out of the main disc images but the images including firmware being more visibly advertised and it made clear on the download pages what hardware requires it and who needs it.

So the firmware for a certain WiFi card is the same, no matter if you use Linux or Windows of MacOS? And it is provided by the manufacturer of the Hardware? 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?

There are a few models that don't need a firmware blob or where the manufacturer provided source code for it (mostly pre ac Atheros chips).

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

#129

Post by ATsch »

- HEADLINE: Simplify contributing to Debian.

- DESCRIPTION: TL;DR: Debian's web pages are hard to navigate and use and it's very hard to see what's happening.

I contribute to FOSS projects whenever I have time and have been wanting to contribute to Debian, but the difficulty is offputting. I'm used to searching for the program name and arriving at a portal page from which I can easily browse the source, see the current problems and instantly start interacting with the community. Unfortunately, contributing to Debian seems to require in-depth knowledge about many systems and arcane email commands. As a would-be contributor this completely alienates me.

One reason is that Debian has many independent services: lintian, mailing lists, manpages (which btw are fantastic and give me hope), Wiki, CI, alioth, the package listing, BTS, etc. To contribute, you need to learn most of them and For example, searching a package name gives me a page at packages.debian.org, but it's very hard to navigate or even discover the other services from there. I can't easily see if there are any lintian issues, critical bugs or current discussions. Additionally, I find most of the systems very hard to use (I still can't figure out the mailing list archives). Ideally, these services would be more tightly integrated.

Another big reason Debian is very hard to contribute to is the main discussion takes place via mailing lists. I understand that many people enjoy working with them, but for light usage they are a big pain. Submitting and history are in completely different programs, there seems to be no real threading, volume is often high and reading large amounts of emails is a chore to me. A solution here would be an improved mailing list archive with options for replying directly integrated to the site.

- DISTRIBUTION: unstable

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Student

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

#130

Post by avar »

whbboyd wrote: post #122
avar wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see that I mixed up two of my laptops in my example. You're right, but my general feature request still stands. Yes the iwlwifi firmware in particular is shipped on the nonfree firmware CD image. But the firmware my other laptop isn't. With the stretch rc5 non-free image mounted: $ dpkg -c firmware/firmware-iwlwifi_20161130-3_all.deb|grep -c ucode 46 But instead of providing the b43 firmware there's only a network…

Blame Broadcom for that; the b43 firmware may not legally be redistributed, so the only legal option is the fwcutter.

Hence my suggestion that the Debian project distribute a script that I can run to get the firmware myself & trivially build my own install CD, and that this be prominently advertised on debian.org.

The Debian project already ships that sort of script in the current non-free firmware CD, so clearly it's not a legal issue. What it doesn't ship is the ability to run that on another machine as part of preparing an ISO to install on a fresh machine that needs the proprietary firmware.

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