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

Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

debian.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 132 posts

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#51

Post by petsos »

rogerbinns wrote: post #45
petsos wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 projec…

Who says the original developers stopped supporting it? Head on over to http://www.kernel.org and you'll see that 3.2 has longterm support (ie the kernel developers backport relevant fixes and patches). There are more details at https://www.kernel.org/releases.html including end of life dates. Given the time span between Debian releases, 3.2 is an excellent choice, if not the only one.

Right, this may be true for the kernel, but it can't be and it is not true for all of Debian's packages. Case in point Django: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/internals/security/

Since the release of Django 1.4, version 1.2 stopped receiving security fixes by the Django development team. What that means is that a Debian maintainer (which probably is not a Django developer) would have to hack any new security fix into the unsupported 1.2. And this is deemed more stable than say, upgrading to 1.3.

Note that Django is just an example, obviously there are many more packages with the exact same problem.

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#52

Post by [deleted] »

eropple wrote: post #10
pervycreeper wrote: post #2

Would this be a good time to migrate from Ubuntu?

I'm not, because I find Debian's KVM support to be not what I expect, but if you don't like Ubuntu for whatever reason, it's not a bad time to do it. That said, Debian stable means you'd better be happy with what you have for a very long time unless you want to deal with the often-painful stable->testing or stable->unstable migration. (It can be done, I've done it many times, but expect it to break something.) Person…

[deleted]

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#53

Post by shared4you »

My sources.list has the word "testing" all this while. Should I change it to "wheezy" now? I'm asking because I guess new packages (in large numbers!) will start trickling down to testing/jessie and the possibility of breakage is high. What is a reasonable time to expect this "rush" to slowdown or come back to the pace of "normal" testing?

I can probably live with my existing "testing" for say 1-2 months, after which I would like newer packages.

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#54

Post by FooBarWidget »

jmomo wrote: post #44
moe wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

/opt is basically for 3rd parties to install software, because they can't be trusted to behave and integrate with the regular filesystem. The last thing you want is Oracle farking around with anything under /usr or /var, because they will fuck up your entire OS for their benefit alone. That is why /opt exists, in my understanding. /srv is a bit questionable to me. Basically it's another /var. I always used directorie…

Because Oracle cannot install to /usr/local/oracle? I don't see the value of /opt.

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#55

Post by FooBarWidget »

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)?

I prefer Ubuntu LTS nowadays. Debian's support for AppArmor and SELinux is still broken and it doesn't look like they're going to fix it any time soon. On Ubuntu they seem to work fine.

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#56

Post by pfg »

petsos wrote: post #34
JoshTriplett wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 projec…

That's one of the reasons why I try to get as much software from the actual developers as possible, instead of relying on packages maintained by [Debian|Ubuntu|Red Hat|...].

Obviously this is a lot of work (patches, managing dependencies, ...) if you do it for everything, but if you stick to the most important packages (e.g. nginx for your webserver, postgres for your db server, ...) I think it's manageable and will give you a lot of benefits.

(Thinking about the Debian OpenSSL fiasco a few years ago, I guess one could make an even stronger argument, though to be fair it was a pretty extreme case and I don't think anything like that has happened since back then.)

//Edit: I got curious about the OpenSSL issue from 2008 and it turns out that the Debian maintainers weren't solely responsible for the bug[0].

[0]: http://research.swtch.com/openssl

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#58

Post by mverwijs »

shared4you wrote: post #53

My sources.list has the word "testing" all this while. Should I change it to "wheezy" now? I'm asking because I guess new packages (in large numbers!) will start trickling down to testing/jessie and the possibility of breakage is high. What is a reasonable time to expect this "rush" to slowdown or come back to the pace of "normal" testing? I can probably live with my existing "testing" for say 1-2 months, after which…

I'd say switch the sources.list to 'stable' or 'wheezy' for a few weeks. After that, switch back to 'testing' and run "apt-get dist-upgrade --assume-no" and see what Debian is going to upgrade.

There is no real proper way to do this, other than testing in a VM, or a chroot.

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#59

Post by perlgeek »

shared4you wrote: post #53

My sources.list has the word "testing" all this while. Should I change it to "wheezy" now? I'm asking because I guess new packages (in large numbers!) will start trickling down to testing/jessie and the possibility of breakage is high. What is a reasonable time to expect this "rush" to slowdown or come back to the pace of "normal" testing? I can probably live with my existing "testing" for say 1-2 months, after which…

Using release code names ("wheezy") is generally safer, because that way you don't accidentally upgrade.

Note that if you have pinning rules, then there you must also change "testing" to "wheezy".

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#60

Post by claudius »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #54
jmomo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/opt is basically for 3rd parties to install software, because they can't be trusted to behave and integrate with the regular filesystem. The last thing you want is Oracle farking around with anything under /usr or /var, because they will fuck up your entire OS for their benefit alone. That is why /opt exists, in my understanding. /srv is a bit questionable to me. Basically it's another /var. I always used directorie…

Because Oracle cannot install to /usr/local/oracle? I don't see the value of /opt.

/usr/local is meant to replicate /usr in the way that binaries go into /usr/local/bin, libraries into /usr/local/lib etc., but for software that isn’t managed by the package manager – at least that’s what it is used for nowadays. So a well-behaving software would happily go into /usr/local, whereas the ugly software things that want their own folder somewhere better go into /opt.
Post reply on HN