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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”)?

#151

Post by JoshTriplett »

rxlim wrote: post #111
eeZah7Ux wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's correct. Debian ships sysvinit as well as systemd and daemons have initscripts/confs for both. A lot of people still use sysvinit and it just works.

If this is really true, I might have to eat my own words.

If you do run into cases where something doesn't work as expected with sysvinit instead of systemd, please do file a bug.

For that matter, if this is a use case you care about, systemd-shim could use a maintainer or maintenance team: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=832508

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

#152

Post by ghostly_s »

gub09 wrote: post #148

HEADLINE: Consolidation of Documentation; Removal of Outdated Documentation DESCRIPTION: Any time you do a web search for anything regarding Debian, the search results include a huge amount of official but outdated information. Normally for Linux-related questions I refer to the amazing Arch wiki, but there are topics that are Debian-specific, and then sifting through all the detritus is a huge waste of time. There's…

Hear, hear. The site is generally an excellent resource but I've also come across reams of outdated guides which steered me wrong, and worse, have sometimes left my system in an indefinite state because I only realized halfway through that this guide is no longer relevant. Cleaning this stuff up should be a priority.

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

#153

Post by ZenoArrow »

falcolas wrote: post #117
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?

Not the OP, but: - It's effectively a black box that nobody but the systemd team really understands; and the response by said team to problems with systemd too often defaults to "you're doing it wrong" - Systemd is not just an init system, it's a message bus, authentication system, logging system, container management system, xinitd system, and any other number of highly coupled systems. - Service startup order can s…

Thank you for your response falcolas. Addressing your points:

> "- It's effectively a black box that nobody but the systemd team really understands; and the response by said team to problems with systemd too often defaults to "you're doing it wrong""

Is this because the data being passed around is represented in binary form rather than text form (e.g. binary logs rather than text-based logs)?

> "- Systemd is not just an init system, it's a message bus, authentication system, logging system, container management system, xinitd system, and any other number of highly coupled systems."

Sure, but this doesn't strike me as neccessarily bad. I appreciate the Unix philosophy is based around having a series of tools that serve a single purpose that can be chained together in different ways, but it's still a necessity to have common interfaces over which this chaining takes place. Is this again related to the binary vs. text issue?

> "- Service startup order can still be non-deterministic and fairly slow; hard init problems have been made harder, while easy init problems "only" remain easy."

The non-determinism and speed of start up both strike me as major issues, thank you for mentioning them. Does anyone know if there are there plans to tackle these issues?

> "- Unit files can be stored in a minimum of four separate locations on disk, and this can be increased dynamically."

Again, this also seems like a reasonable complaint. Is this issue due to the intrinsic design of systemd or is this solely a flaw in the implementation?

> "- Failures are opaque, and the failure of systemd triggers the failure of the entire system."

Are there no fallbacks in place should a systemd component fail? I see no reason why this couldn't be implemented.

> "and instead of iterating against that goal, the team's focus has shifted to take over all aspects of the Linux runtime which isn't managed by the kernel."

I don't disagree with that assessment, but there must be reasons why systemd is proving popular amongst distro maintainers. Why would you suggest that is? What advantages do you gain from having a unified layer that provides the services that systemd provides?

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

#154

Post by ghostly_s »

Ianp5a wrote: post #107

HEADLINE: Installer easy option to separate OS / and /home partitions. DESCRIPTION: It is often recommended to separate the OS partition from the users data partition containing /home. This should be available as an easy option for non IT users. If 1 partition exists, a recommended split MB size is is default. If 2 partitions exist, they are checked for OS files and home files, so the user sees which one will be over…

The installer already provides this option as a suggestion?

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

#155

Post by acd »

Headline: Light Debian desktop theme

Describtion: Debian should have easy usability to set the desktop theme to a light color theme. Right now it is quite difficult for users to change desktop look and feel. Please also make usability testing of changing desktop settings. The current color scheme which is dark does suit all users. A dark and light theme should more users covered.

Many thanks to all the Debian developers for creating a great distribution!

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

#156

Post by allan_wind »

hsivonen wrote: post #50

HEADLINE: Repurpose testing as a rolling release positioned for not-just-testing usage DESCRIPTION: There are users who'd like to use a non-corporate community distro but who don't need or want software to be as old as software in Debian stable. The standard answer is "use testing" (e.g. http://ral-arturo.org/2017/05/11/debian-myths.html ), but 1) security support for testing is documented to be slower than for stabl…

Is the concept of a release still important? OpenBSD did away with the CDs for instance, so what is the value of calling a tag for a particular set of packages (versions) a release?

The only time I cared was when I installed from scratch on a new computer (too much hazle to mirror and existing drive and figure out how to switch from bios to efi etc), and last time, stable did not support my hardware, testing and nightly did not work due to being in transit to release. In other words the lack of any suitable installer meant I was forced to use another distribution (Ubuntu).

I have tried both testing and unstable and both broke for me at inconvenient times, usually I was not the first to notice, and with some effort usually able to find a fix or work-around. Stable plus backports work well, although as a rule, you are stuck on old packages unless (at least the way I use it) explicitly upgrade a particular package. It is configuration that I have to manually sync between machines.

Other than varnish (3rd party repo which is going away I believe) I have no issues with automated (i.e apt-cron) updates for many years.

What I would love to see is a rolling release that is non-breaking. If something breaks, roll that particular package back. I don't know what the particular mechanism that would be, but the ticket system (which is a wealth of data) could be an input along with local configuration.

Push upgrades. With stable, security fixes, is a feed, but it would nice if I don't need to jury-rig something myself to minimize my exposure window. With rolling releases, it would be nice to get that faster (or if you prefer delayed by a configurable amount).

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

#157

Post by sandGorgon »

sandGorgon wrote: post #98

HEADLINE: a merger of flatpkg and snap DESCRIPTION: a consensus on the next generation of package management. Please. We have had decades of fragmentation (not to mention duplicated innovation) around the RPM vs DEB ecosystem. Which is why it is still hard for beginners to want to use Linux - try explaining to anyone who comes from a Mac about rpm vs deb vs whatever else. Which is why they would pay for the mac rathe…

Just came to add another comment on how bad it was - I just wanted to download pypy for some experiments.

http://pypy.org/download.html

>download PyPy from your release vendor (usually an outdated version): Ubuntu (PPA), Debian, Homebrew, MacPorts, Fedora, Gentoo and Arch are known to package PyPy, with various degrees of being up-to-date.

This is the world of Linux software installation.

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

#158

Post by guillemj »

apenwarr wrote: post #133

Eliminate all the scripts that go into a package, moving them to runtime. This is the only way to eliminate instability caused by buggy scripts that then prevent upgrades. Also get rid of all interactivity during install and upgrade. It's deadly for managing big fleets.

I assume you mean maintainer scripts here. If so we are already going in that direction: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/Spec/DeclarativePackaging

For interactivity that should in principle be a solved problem with debconf, if it's not, we would like to hear what's lacking. If there is a problem with a particular package then a bug report would be appreciated.

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

#159

Post by hd4 »

- HEADLINE: An install-time option to set up a barebones WM

- DESCRIPTION: The installer should offer an option to install a simple WM, like i3 or awesomewm, in the way that there is an option in the minimal installer to install a DE like Xfce or GNOME. Bonus points if you make it aesthetically pleasing to some extent.

- HEADLINE: Kernels in repo which do more than the mainline/default kernel

- DESCRIPTION: I'm thinking of specifically of the patches by Con Kolivas, but any other useful pre-compiled kernels being available in the repo would be great, it would save me having to figure it out by myself and I'm sure there are many who would welcome the availability of pre-patched kernels, better i/o schedulers etc

- HEADLINE: Look into more optimisation (like Solus)

- DESCRIPTION: Solus (www.solus-project.com) does some optimisation on their distro that would be a good-to-have in any other distro

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Infrastructure programmer for multinational corp

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

#160

Post by allan_wind »

- HEADLINE: thunderbolt, amt firmware loader

- DESCRIPTION: The last laptop that I bought from Lenovo had a thunderbolt port, and I had to use that port to get 3 x 4k monitors to work. The hardware shipping with non-functional firmware. The only way to upgrade the firmware was by booting Windows. I was not sure if there were other devices with old firmware, so I spent hours waiting for a full OS upgrade. Dell was working on a thunderbolt firmware loader at the time, not sure if they released it by now.

Similar situation with the AMI firmware security issues (CVE-2017-5689). The only way to upgrade (afaik) is by running a particular windows installer.

It seems really dumb having to buy a throw-away drive just to be able to boot windows to upgrade firmware. Obviously, I understand this at the feet of the hardware vendor. I was going to suggest pre-installed Debian, but Lenovo will ruin that with pre-installed crapware.

- DISTRIBUTION: stable

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: entrepreneur

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