91–100 of 210 posts
Yeah no thanks, just look at the abomination like pure-ftpd, apache, nginx, etc. I don't need some weird opinion configuration framework to go with the software I use.
MySQL? Nah you get mariadb
The counterpoint would be the Debian-specific loss of private key entropy [1] back in 2008. While this is now a very ancient bug, the obvious follow-up question would be: how does Debian prevent or mitigate such incidents today? Was there any later (non-security, of course) incident of similar nature? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSL#Predictable_private_ke...
as always: imho (!)
i remember this incident - if my memory doesn't trick me:
it was openssl which accessed memory it didn't allocated to collect randomness / entropy for key-generation.
and valgrind complained about a possible memory-leak - its a profiling-tool with the focus on detecting memory-mgmt problems.
instead of taking a closer look / trying to understand what exactly went on there / causes the problem, the maintainer simply commented out / disabled those accesses...
mistakes happen, but the debian-community handled this problem very well - as in my impression they always do and did.
idk ... i prefere the open and community-driven approach from debian anytime over distributions which are associated to companies.
last but not least, the have a social contract.
long story short: at least for me this was an argument for the debian gnu/linux distribution, not against :))
just my 0.02€
As someone who maintained a (PHP) library that Debian distributed, it fucking sucked that they made source modifications. There were a number of times where they broke the library in subtle ways, and there was little to no indication to users of the library that they were running a forked version. I also never had any contact from them about the supposed "bugs" they were patching.
As a maintainer, I can certainly understand how it feels like that, I'd probably wouldn't feel great about it either. As a user, I'm curious what kind of modifications they felt were needed, what exactly did they change in your library?
The best part is when they swap FFmpeg or other libraries, make things compile somehow, don't test the results, and then ship completely broken software.
Debian will remove code that “calls home” or tries to update software in a way that bypasses the Debian packaging system. Thank god. I'm so happy that such a distro exists.
Most good stuffed Distros do this. For example SUSE recently banned a package because of "calling home" e.g. did side-leading. https://security.opensuse.org/2025/05/07/deepin-desktop-remo... Debian indeed does this. In release FF has disabled telemetry: https://wiki.debian.org/Firefox
As someone who maintained a (PHP) library that Debian distributed, it fucking sucked that they made source modifications. There were a number of times where they broke the library in subtle ways, and there was little to no indication to users of the library that they were running a forked version. I also never had any contact from them about the supposed "bugs" they were patching.
> it fucking sucked that they made source modifications As a maintainer, I can certainly understand how it feels like that, I'd probably wouldn't feel great about it either. As a user, I'm curious what kind of modifications they felt were needed, what exactly did they change in your library?
This was a while ago (10+ years), but my recollection is that someone presumably had reported that parts of the library didn't conform to the spec, and Debian patched those. This broke parsing actual feeds, and caused weeks of debugging issues that couldn't be replicated. Had they reported upstream in the first instance, I could have investigated, but there was no opportunity to do so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most good stuffed Distros do this. For example SUSE recently banned a package because of "calling home" e.g. did side-leading. https://security.opensuse.org/2025/05/07/deepin-desktop-remo... Debian indeed does this. In release FF has disabled telemetry: https://wiki.debian.org/Firefox
I wouldn't think the Firefox license allows them to do that. I thought only binaries built by Mozilla could use the FF brand.
Debian will remove code that “calls home” or tries to update software in a way that bypasses the Debian packaging system. Thank god. I'm so happy that such a distro exists.
Yes, I've disabled the update check. No, it doesn't solve the problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any statistics that show that Debian patches introduce more CVE worthy bugs than the software already contains? OpenSSL doesn't really have a pristine history. Let's not forget that the patch had been posted on the OpenSSL mailing list and had received a go ahead comment before that. Having said that, if you're asking if there's a penetration test team that reviews all the patches. No there isn't. Like th…
The patch was posted on the wrong OpenSSL mailing list, and frankly that particular Debian bug was worse than anything else we've seen even from OpenSSL. Last I knew Debian didn't do dedicated security review of patches to security-critical software, which is normal practice for other distributions.