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Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

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Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#61

Post by claudius »

shmerl wrote: post #30
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.

Use Debian testing for the desktop. Desktop users don't use stable, or at least use it with backports. And what's so unbearable for the server? As others pointed out, RHEL ships even an earlier version of the kernel.

My mum is quite happy with Debian stable on her desktop, and I don’t plan to switch from Wheezy to Jessie on my laptop for a while either. What’s wrong with stable on desktops?

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#62

Post by networked »

Glad to see Wheezy finally become Stable.

I used to run Debian on a PowerPC Mac as my main desktop system and today I still use a "portable server" Palm Pre Plus running Squeeze chroot on a regular basis. In my experience Debian is really great on non-x86 hardware. Too bad the old webOS kernel means I won't be able to upgrade it to Wheezy, at least not easily.

That said, I wish Debian would compete with Ubuntu LTS on longer support for OldStable. (Ubuntu LTS releases are now supported for five years [1] while a Debian Stable release is expected to get three years of support [2].)

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS

[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#63

Post by claudius »

petsos wrote: post #51
rogerbinns wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

If the Debian maintainer has any idea what he’s doing, then this is likely to be more stable than upgrading to a new release that introduces new features and possibly incompatibilities. Fortunately, most Debian maintainers have a very good idea of what they’re doing.

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#64

Post by FooBarWidget »

claudius wrote: post #60
FooBarWidget wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And why is that distinction important? It seems a fairly arbitrary rule to me. What's the problem with dropping stuff in /usr/local/foo?

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#65

Post by mverwijs »

dsr_ wrote: post #3
pervycreeper wrote: post #2

Would this be a good time to migrate from Ubuntu?

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.

That really depends on your desktop. For my daily life, I use Firefox (iceweasel), Google Chrome, a terminal, some ruby or python.

All of these have a channel for installing the latest version of their software without having to dist-upgrade.

XFCE hasn't had a notable UI change in years (at least not discernable to me). KDE and GNOME have only mucked things up over the last decade.

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#66

Post by mverwijs »

kbar13 wrote: post #16
eropple wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

and with upstart &co

I'm unable to determine if you mean upstart to be a Good Thing, or a Bad Thing, or anything in between.

To me, switching back from Ubuntu to Debian was a blessing. And I simply cannot understand this need to decrease boottimes. My laptop boots into Debian under 12 seconds. That is pretty fast. Under Ubuntu, I timed it at 10 seconds.

2 seconds boottime? Is that what this upstart/systemd hastle is all about? I just do not get that.

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#68

Post by buster »

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.

Because, maybe, but only maybe, there might be software that is not split up into lib, bin, doc directories and that doesn't log into /var/log?! There actually is quite some software like that and sometimes it even has a technical reason.

Especially some commercial and proprietary software that runs on Windows, HP-UX, SCO, AIX, Solaris and Linux tends to go the "easy way" of packaging and just put stuff in one place on every system.

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#69

Post by FooBarWidget »

buster wrote: post #68
FooBarWidget wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because, maybe, but only maybe, there might be software that is not split up into lib, bin, doc directories and that doesn't log into /var/log?! There actually is quite some software like that and sometimes it even has a technical reason. Especially some commercial and proprietary software that runs on Windows, HP-UX, SCO, AIX, Solaris and Linux tends to go the "easy way" of packaging and just put stuff in one place…

And how does your point lead to the conclusion that installing such third-party software to /usr/local/whatever is a bad idea? I can just run 'ls /usr/local' to see a list of non-conforming software.

Re: Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released

#70

Post by buster »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #69
buster wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, maybe, but only maybe, there might be software that is not split up into lib, bin, doc directories and that doesn't log into /var/log?! There actually is quite some software like that and sometimes it even has a technical reason. Especially some commercial and proprietary software that runs on Windows, HP-UX, SCO, AIX, Solaris and Linux tends to go the "easy way" of packaging and just put stuff in one place…

And how does your point lead to the conclusion that installing such third-party software to /usr/local/whatever is a bad idea? I can just run 'ls /usr/local' to see a list of non-conforming software.

I didn't say it's a bad idea, i said it's a matter of fact that software exists that runs in /opt/ and that sometimes there are reasons to do so. For example, a particular usecase is to have a specific mountpoint that holds shared binary and configuration in a cluster environment that can't be mixed with native applications and configuration files. Also sometimes you don't have the user rights to install in /usr or policy forbids to install 3rd party software in /usr. /opt is the usual way to go then.
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