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Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

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Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#31

Post by moe »

pconf wrote: post #29
oinksoft wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why we have the FHS ;) /srv contains site-specific data which is served by this system. http://www.samba.org/~cyeoh/pub/fhs-2.3.html#SRVDATAFORSERVI... Unfortunately, /srv/ is often ignored. Good move by Debian to make this change, and hopefully this gets the ball rolling for other distros.

/srv will continue to be ignored just as /opt and other one-offs are ignored. Reason being that they duplicate existing functionality, in this case under /var, /usr, or /usr/local. What /srv/ really stands for is NIH.

/opt is justified. /srv is indeed NIH (redundant with /var/whatever).

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#32

Post by petsos »

oinksoft wrote: post #15
verroq wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shows how unbearably slow Debian's release cycle is. Wheezy ships with all the latest packages from 2 years ago.

So then run ArchLinux on your servers, and godspeed? Debian is not aimed at having the latest and greatest, but its packages do tend to be more up-to-date than RHEL/CentOS, which is its main competition in the "stable server distro that doesn't get you fired" category.

So our options are either bleeding edge versions or prehistoric ones?

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#33

Post by cdjk »

oinksoft wrote: post #7
pervycreeper wrote: post #2

Would this be a good time to migrate from Ubuntu?

Just make sure you're not on "testing" if you're doing this for a desktop (note that it is uncommon to run "testing" on a server). This release means that Sid ("unstable") just became "testing". Now, many folks are running Sid fine on their desktops, but historically the Sid -> testing push is volatile in the short term, and you probably would want to wait a couple weeks. Basically, be wary of "testing" after a relea…

Not quite. Sid is always unstable, and the new testing is jessie:

http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/

Otherwise you're right - now it probably not the best time to switch to jessie/testing.

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#34

Post by petsos »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #25
will1000 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression that a newer kernel ment more hardware support. Am I wrong?

Debian's 3.2 kernel includes backported support for much newer hardware from more recent kernels. Debian's primary kernel maintainer, Ben Hutchings, also serves as the upstream maintainer of the 3.2 stable kernel series.

And that I think is the biggest problem of Debian. They aim stability but how can you possibly claim that your custom backports are stable when e.g. the original developers have stopped supporting it?

They may be able to pull it off with the kernel, but they can't possibly do it for all their packages. As an example: How are the Django backports to 1.2 more stable than upgrading to 1.3 when the official Django project has stopped supporting 1.2?

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#35

Post by nuclear_eclipse »

moe wrote: post #31
pconf wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/srv will continue to be ignored just as /opt and other one-offs are ignored. Reason being that they duplicate existing functionality, in this case under /var, /usr, or /usr/local. What /srv/ really stands for is NIH.

/opt is justified. /srv is indeed NIH (redundant with /var/ whatever ).

Keeping all user/site data under /srv makes it superbly easy to back up everything on a server from a single base directory.

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#36

Post by xfs »

karlmdavis wrote: post #4

> This release includes numerous updated software packages, such as: > Linux 3.2 For anyone else wondering, Ubuntu 13.04 has the 3.8 kernel and 12.04.2 has the 3.5 kernel ( https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack ).

You can expect most bugs in 3.2 has been fixed so it's very stable. Old doesn't mean unmaintained. Debian's kernel developer Ben Hutchings has been backporting for 3.2 for a long time with lots of security fixes and hardware enablement. In comparison, RHEL 6 uses 2.6.32 with lots of selected stuff backported. This development model avoids new random features introducing bugs.

Also, you can have newer kernels in the debian backports repo.

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#37

Post by [deleted] »

xfs wrote: post #36
karlmdavis wrote: post #4

> This release includes numerous updated software packages, such as: > Linux 3.2 For anyone else wondering, Ubuntu 13.04 has the 3.8 kernel and 12.04.2 has the 3.5 kernel ( https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack ).

You can expect most bugs in 3.2 has been fixed so it's very stable. Old doesn't mean unmaintained. Debian's kernel developer Ben Hutchings has been backporting for 3.2 for a long time with lots of security fixes and hardware enablement. In comparison, RHEL 6 uses 2.6.32 with lots of selected stuff backported. This development model avoids new random features introducing bugs. Also, you can have newer kernels in the d…

[deleted]

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#38

Post by thristian »

eropple wrote: post #13
dsr_ wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly. Wheezy is the new "stable", which will get security support for a year past the introduction of the next stable release. It's an excellent choice for servers, and right now it's not a bad desktop release. In another year or so you might want to move to the testing release for a desktop that needs the latest features.

Debian testing won't have "the latest features" a year from now, though. I guess it'll have "later features", but IME desktops really benefit from tracking unstable. Which, as one might expect, is sometimes...unstable. Enter Ubuntu. There's a pretty good reason to use Debian on servers because of the long support cycles, but on a desktop I feel like most people are going to probably prefer an Ubuntu setup.

Debian has historically run on an approximately 2-year release cycle (and more recent releases have been closer to that cadence). Right now, Testing is kind of old, because it's been frozen in the run-up to the Wheezy release. In a month or two, Testing will probably be mostly current, and will stay that way until about 18 months' time when the Jessie freeze kicks in, and then it'll be a slow wait until the release of Jessie and then the cycle repeats.

Ubuntu is too... opinionated for my tastes, and other distros are too conservative (CentOS/RHEL) or too wild (Arch, Gentoo). Debian Testing seems to have a high-quality, comprehensive package archive and keep reasonably up-to-date, and if the price to pay is that for six months every two years you get a stable desktop environment instead... no complaints from me.

EDIT: The usual lag between Testing and Unstable is 10 days, except in big, complicated transitions and dependencies (say, when a commonly used shared library is being upgraded to a new, incompatible ABI). Again, I could probably be more up-to-date if I tracked Unstable instead of Testing, but I'd rather wait for Debian to nail down its migration plan in Unstable so I can upgrade smoothly, rather than have the latest and greatest and have to rebuild my own packages occasionally.

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#40

Post by jmillikin »

derefr wrote: post #39

So what would people's opinions be on running this vs. Ubuntu LTS on a server? What about one that relies on more recent features (LXC et al)?

Personally, I would prefer Debian to Ubuntu-LTS on servers. The primary advantage of Ubuntu over Debian is access to more recent package versions, and LTS surrenders most of that advantage in an attempt to approach Debian's reliability. Besides, most use cases for servers don't require bleeding-edge packages as long as the distribution is backporting security fixes.

I wouldn't worry about LXC support; it's fairly old tech by now, and even the previous stable version of Debian supports it. LXC in Wheezy should work just fine.

The only major issue I can think of with putting servers on Debian is their very very old kernel versions. The kernel in Wheezy is missing a lot of recent optimizations in the networking and filesystem code, and doesn't support user namespaces (important for container-based virtualization).

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