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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”)?

#203
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…

Ditto. In the last 2 years I actually switched to Fedora because of the clearer and easier road to contribution. (Area: design)

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

#204

HEADLINE: Create local copy of remote repos DESCRIPTION: Personally I'd like something like 'apt-get update --local' which pulled down a remote copy of every repo. That's be super handy for something like a build machine, and it'd reduce the need to install & maintain an Aptly repo.

Did you look at apt-cacher-ng or the other similar tools?

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

#205

HEADLINE: list apt package dependencies DESCRIPTION: something like 'apt-get deps ' returning a list of all deps for a package. This would be super duper when trying to install a standalone package file on a system where the deps aren't already present.

There is already «apt-cache depends » or even «apt-cache depends --recurse ». Perhaps those are missing something?

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

#206

HEADLINE SELinux installed by default DESCRIPTION Not sure what else to say...

This one is (partially) for me I guess.

There is still some work needed for this to happen.

The SELinux support should be added in the debian-installer and the policy needs to be generic enough to support several (basic?) usecases.

The later is the difficult part, if the policy is not working for them, people will in most of the case just disable SELinux completely.

Having a list of well tested usecases (LAMP, DNS,...) that we could support would maybe be a good start.

Help is always welcome of course.

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

#207
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been part of the dpkg roadmap for some time now ( https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/RoadMap ). And something I'm slowly but progressively moving towards. But TBH it has been low priority. Knowing of projects that require it, and specifically which parts, or that are already using the static libdpkg library are very valuable, so that those parts can be improved. If there's enough interest, my plan could be t…

> Knowing of projects that require it, and specifically which parts, or that are already using the static libdpkg library are very valuable, so that those parts can be improved. What would be the best way of contributing this sort of information?

Either here or I guess a mail to the debian-dpkg@lists.debian.org mailing list would do, whatever is most convenient. :)

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

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please no.. Apparmor is far more usable and functionally equivalent.

Why not both? In the docker world, it would be a huge improvement.

The problem is that the docker policy is RHEL/Fedora centric and is not upstreamed in the refpolicy AFAIK

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

#209
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…

As a parallel, one of the reasons Slack has won in the paid-chat stakes is because of it's buttery-smooth onboarding process. The chat client isn't anything special, really, but it's just so easy to get set up and running.

The difficulty gradient of onboarding is a significant contributor to attracting folks.

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

#210

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…

I remember hearing a Debian Developer give a talk where he said that 'testing' can almost be considered a normal rolling distro in its own right, but there are times when it's broken - the example he gave was that at one point the installer itself was broken for a short time.
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