Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 329 posts

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

#161

Post by zeotroph »

whbboyd wrote: post #119
pwdisswordfish wrote: post #89

HEADLINE: Easier way to create local packages 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 sta…

Look into the equivs package: https://packages.debian.org/stretch/equivs . It's intended mostly for making metapackages, but you can include files as well.

This (and checkinstall) are stopgaps, ideally the .deb creation process would get an entirely new packaging toolchain, with the minimal arguments: dependencies, build-dependencies, sourcefile/url/repo, buildcommands.

Then a linter could tell you that a changelog.Debian.gz, man-pages and debtags are still missing, but for internal redistribution that is enough for now.

And can failed build commands continue from where they were interrupted? Always cleaning everything is terrible for iterative exploration of the package creation process. The final package should be marked as tainted of course, but always starting a minute long compile process should be skippable.

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

#162

Post by oneplane »

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…

A problem would be the security updates. You can't really spend even 'more' people on security updates for a rolling release. The frequency of updates would be too high for this to work.

This is also the reason for only stable (and olstable?) getting security updates. The thing is that if you want to support something, you'll need to scope it. You can't support just any random thing, you'd need an army of maintainers just to do that. So you make a 'release' where that specific version has people watching over it and making sure things are safe and working. Even that process is hard enough as-is.

While it would certainly be nice to have a rolling release, or 'really fast' release, it can only be done if more hours/people/donations are available to fuel it.

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

#163

Post by kofejnik »

raverbashing wrote: post #45
kofejnik wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Switching to default Py3 is a breaking change Not only breaking, but also completely unnecessary

Python 2.7 being EOL at a future date means switching to Python 3 is needed

even if Guido denounces 2 completely, I'm ready to bet some $$ that 2 will be alive and well long after that date

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

#164

Post by sakawa »

ATsch wrote: post #129

- 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 curre…

Generally I agree with most of the submissions, but this one is the most important.

I really love debian because of its principles (and I would love to contribute), but I feel that new contributors (like me) have problems because of the many (and some old) tools and outdated and non-friendly documentation.

Also, I don't know how many contributors come and stay, but even in unstable I see some outdated packages in weeks, and also some useful software that is not packaged.

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

#165

Post by agwa »

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.

Yes, it's true.

To replace PID 1 with sysvinit, run:

  apt-get install sysvinit-core systemd-sysv-
  reboot
To prevent it from coming back, create the file /etc/apt/preferences.d/no-systemd.pref containing:

  Package: systemd-sysv
  Pin: origin *
  Pin-Priority: -1
This works great on servers and lightweight desktops. As others have noted, if you want GNOME you also need to install systemd-shim. I have no experience with this, but I have no reason to doubt that it works.

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

#166

Post by SteveNuts »

pwdisswordfish wrote: post #89

HEADLINE: Easier way to create local packages 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 sta…

I always use FPM

https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm

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

#168

Post by kebolio »

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?

firmware is specific to chipset and are binary blobs supplied by the manufacturer. ath9k-supported and generally realtek cards don't need firmware; theo de raadt noticed the culture difference between american vendors like intel and broadcom who leave the functionality to the firmware so they can be first to market, and chinese vendors like realtek who take their time to best fit customer needs

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

#169

Post by heftysync »

HEADLINE: Better package discovery

DESCRIPTION: There are a ton of packages in Debian. I sometimes browse through all of the packages looking for some gem that I didn't know about before. It's a time intensive process and I don't have any input into my decision other than reading the description. Sometimes I'll install it immediately. Other times I'll check out the website to see if it's still maintained (or if there's a better alternative). It's all a very manual process.

popcon doesn't fill this void. Popcon tells me what packages are popular across all users. I'm more interested in what a subset of users with similar interests or preferences would install. Or maybe I want to see what it's like to live in someone else's shoes. For instance, maybe I'm learning a new programming language and I want to setup my environment similar to an experienced user so I have all of the popular libraries already installed.

It would be nice if there was a better way to discover packages that are relevant to you. Perhaps you could add this feature as a way of getting people to install popcon? For example, you could say if you install popcon, then it will upload your set of installed packages and make recommendations for you.

If people are able to add metadata about themselves (e.g. I'm an expert Emacs user and I'm a golang developer), then you could use that plus their package list to make recommendations. I could say "show me what packages golang developers tend to install". Or you could say "for someone with a package list similar to mine, find out what packages are popular that I'm missing".

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

#170

Post by shmerl »

- HEADLINE: improve transitions and out of the box usability of rolling Debian variants.

- DESCRIPTION: Since Debian testing / unstable are often advertised as targeted for desktop usage, they can benefit from some more focus on preventing breakage. I know it's somewhat counter intuitive to expect stability from "unstable" or "testing" variant, but at the same time Debian can benefit from avoiding the stigma of server only distro. Having out of the box robust desktop experience (which is not falling behind) is the goal here.

In the period between Jessie and Stretch, testing had a number of breakages in my KDE desktop. Packages fell out of sync (like KDE frameworks and Plasma packages weren't properly aligned, because some packages were stuck in unstable because of not building on some archs) causing all kind of instability issues. It lately became a bit better, but I think desktop stability can get some more love, especially for the most popular DEs like KDE.

And if neither testing nor unstable fit that role, may be another branch should be created for it?

- DISTRIBUTION: Debian testing / unstable.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Programmer, Debian user.

Post reply on HN