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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”)?

#291

Post by dozzie »

rlpb wrote: post #264
Twirrim wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

deb/dpkg/apt is the only one I've seen which does this. All other distributions go for install only. Starting on install is more intuitive for people new to linux, but it's bad as an overall practice.

I think Debian's rationale is that if a sysadmin interactively installs a package, then that sysadmin does so to get its primary service (if any) running, so packages should arrange this by default. > but it's bad as an overall practice. I agree with you, but only in the case of non-interactive use. Different use cases demand different defaults. Tooling should be able to make the appropriate distinction automatically…

> I think Debian's rationale is that if a sysadmin interactively installs a package, then that sysadmin does so to get its primary service (if any) running, so packages should arrange this by default.

Except that if a sysadmin installs a package that provides a daemon, this daemon usually needs to be configured first, so starting it with semi-broken config (and debconf-generated one is still semi-broken) is counterproductive.

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

#292

Post by dozzie »

sandGorgon wrote: post #157
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 download PyPy from your release vendor (usually an outdated version): Ubuntu (PPA), Debian, Homebrew, MacPorts, Fedora, Gentoo and Arch are known to package PyPy, with various degrees of being up-to-date.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.

> This is the world of Linux software installation.

You don't get to first choose Arch for its different packaging system and then act highly surprised that it's different and adds to the variety of package types. Sorry, no banana here.

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

#293

Post by dsr_ »

heftysync wrote: post #169

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…

Popcon also has the disadvantage that it has an unconscious bias: if you care about security, you don't send your package lists out to be part of the survey.

Corporations setting policy for their systems are also unlikely to install popcon.

The overall effect is to bias popcon in favor of home users who don't think much about security.

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

#295

Post by brimstedt »

Headline: better install options

Description: in debian installer you can chose a few standard setups. The default options are a bit crazy to me and also i miss alot of pkgs by default.

A bit of cleanup would be nice (iirc you can select database server for example, that ll give you my/maria)

It would be nice if you yould specify a code like "xxx/yyy" that would resolve to a public repo of predefined templates in which you could also define your own.

I for one, would define a server, workstation and laptop setup. Server setup would includr sshd, screen, etc

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

#296

Post by Shish2k »

brimstedt wrote: post #295

Headline: better install options Description: in debian installer you can chose a few standard setups. The default options are a bit crazy to me and also i miss alot of pkgs by default. A bit of cleanup would be nice (iirc you can select database server for example, that ll give you my/maria) It would be nice if you yould specify a code like "xxx/yyy" that would resolve to a public repo of predefined templates in whi…

A site which allows you to create your own preseed files via GUI, and then gives you a tinyurl-type-code, seems like it should be a relatively easy CRUD app for someone who wants to get started contributing to debian :)

Could be done third-party, but with official debian support we could get support into the installer to type "install di://g3dz" rather than "install preseed=http://mypersonaldomain.com/preseeds/g3dz" (last time I was doing this for myself, typing the full URL of my preseed file into the bootloader was by far the most annoying part of the process :P)

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

#297

Post by jbicha »

HeadlessChild wrote: post #49
jl6 wrote: post #18

HEADLINE: Out of the box support for being run in VirtualBox. DESCRIPTION: I tested the stretch release candidates in VirtualBox, and while I did eventually get them working, I had to follow the instructions in several bug reports from across both the Debian and VirtualBox probably project websites. I don't mind following instructions, so if there is a reason why this can't be achieved seamlessly with zero configurat…

I do also have had some problems running Debian Stretch in Virtual Box. For example I had to install the "xserver-xorg-legacy" package to get the X server working as X is not running as root anymore.

That package is installed by default in Debian 9 (but it was added fairly late in Stretch's development cycle).

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

#298

Post by jbicha »

pksadiq wrote: post #41

- HEADLINE: Try to include gtk4 in Debian 10 GNU/Linux - DESCRIPTION: It would be nice if Debian testing freeze is delayed until an enough stable version of gtk4 is included in testing (and thus eventually in next stable).

Ubuntu 17.10 Alpha already has an early snapshot of gtk4. Debian will get it later this year.

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

#299

Post by julian-klode »

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…

This is impossible. Debian packages are stateful: They have maintainer scripts that can do stuff, they are inherently non-transactional by design.

Even if you can rollback updates, a lot of the time that's no help - your user data format was upgraded, rendering your data useless (especially for web browsers, which you can't really downgrade).

That said, it's trivial to use file system snapshots. Ubuntu has apt-btrfs-snapshot to do this automatically, but it was never provided in Debian AFAICT.

But even with snapshots, you also need to snapshot user state, not just the installation, otherwise you end up with upgraded incompatible data again.

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

#300

Post by anguis_fragilis »

- HEADLINE: Aggressive Optimization of PNG Files

- DESCRIPTION: PNG image files use too much space in Debian's source tree; in user's install size; and in Debian's website.

All meta-data that does not affect display should be removed and the file should receive a complete lossless compression run with an optimizing tool.

Just try: find / -name "*.png" 2>/dev/null | xargs -d '\n' optipng -preserve -o7 -zm1-9 -strip "all"

A byte here, a byte there, and then suddenly your system is now several MB smaller and runs actually faster.

Upstream should be made aware of this.

Thank you.

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