Live data from Hacker News

Today is Debian 8 release day

release.debian.org

61–70 of 152 posts

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#61
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your servers running now? Is there an upgrade path from whatever Linux it is? Do you have a lot of custom configurations? Debian is widely regarded and typically provides two to three years update support for a given code name (e.g. Wheezy or Jessie). There is a proposal for providing Long Term Support (LTS) for Wheezy as has been done for Squeeze.

I really don't have any custom needs. Any old linux distro will do. But only 2 to 3 years? That is very short. What would be a good alternative with longer support? There must be market for it I guess. Don't companies simply want to run their stuff as long as possible? Many companies still use Windows XP. And that's 14 years old. Any major distris that commit to 10 years of support or something?

Do your operations and deployment right, and upgrading shouldn't be an issue.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#62
post #7

dont wont to criticize any of the great & mainly voluntary work of the debian folks, but not quite sure how to interpret these statistics [1] looks like jessie is going to be the first debian stable to be released with rc-critical issues and not "when it's done" some of the bugs referred [2] seem quite critical indeed, maybe someone with more insight could comment on this? [1] http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/201…

I also wonder the reason for that.

As a speculation from an outsider, I'll list these reasons: Release team was very motivated in this cycle (auto removal of packages, not letting any new package in freeze, very strict exceptions even for packages that fix bugs etc.), most of current rc bugs are lurking there for months without any progress (and since Debian is all volunteer work, they can't force anybody to fix 'em), and they couldn't also remove those packages because they've already removed packages they could remove. Another thing is some of those RC bugs are security issues, which are handled by Security Team for stable and oldstable, so there is no reason for security issues to delay the release. When all these are considered, they may have not deemed further delaying the release worthwhile.

I would also like to hear the real reasons from a team member, though.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#63
post #23

Just on the side note. This was announced on microsoft website about them celebrating about Debian release. http://openness.microsoft.com/blog/2015/04/21/microsoft-debi...

I wonder why, following their new "openness" motto, Microsoft is still not: 1) porting Visual Studio to Linux. 2) porting Office to Linux, or 3) contributing to Wine, with the goal of solving long-standing issues with their (above) software - but hey they could contribute in other areas too, since Wine is far from complete (a USB driver/stack is much needed IMHO). I won't believe in Microsoft "openness" until I see o…

For 1 and 2, probably because there's very little money in it and it would require an immense amount of effort.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#64
post #59
post #53

As an AWS user, I switched from Amazon Linux to Ubuntu 14.04 because it's easy to replicate the development environment. No performance/stability issues so far however I'm curious if Debian 8 has an edge over Ubuntu 14.04 for a medium sized website on AWS. My only gripe with Ubuntu is that apt-get doesn't have the latest stables packages (like Amazon Linux does). I'm guessing it would be the same with Debian.

Debian does tend to run behind and prefer more stable and "mature" releases so I doubt you'll find what you're looking for with 8.

I don't know Amazon Linux packages but Debian 8 packages are newer than Ubuntu 14.04 ones, so he might find what he's looking for unless he always wants newest versions.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#65
post #50

So, what speaks against a netinstall and what in favor of it? Frankly i would just get the DVD package, will i be missing any advantages?

If you're not sure you can get the wifi card working in installer, then get DVD. Otherwise (you can get the wifi card recognized, or installing via ethernet etc.) there is no reason.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#66
post #50

So, what speaks against a netinstall and what in favor of it? Frankly i would just get the DVD package, will i be missing any advantages?

DVD makes sense if you have a dvd player (!) and not a good internet connection. Netinstall are pretty reliable now.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#67
post #7

dont wont to criticize any of the great & mainly voluntary work of the debian folks, but not quite sure how to interpret these statistics [1] looks like jessie is going to be the first debian stable to be released with rc-critical issues and not "when it's done" some of the bugs referred [2] seem quite critical indeed, maybe someone with more insight could comment on this? [1] http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/201…

I also wonder the reason for that. As a speculation from an outsider, I'll list these reasons: Release team was very motivated in this cycle (auto removal of packages, not letting any new package in freeze, very strict exceptions even for packages that fix bugs etc.), most of current rc bugs are lurking there for months without any progress (and since Debian is all volunteer work, they can't force anybody to fix 'em)…

Has there been a significant loss of Debian senior development resources to the https://devuan.org fork, as a result of the systemd debates?

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#68
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an article complaining on how RHEL support a flavor of python that is very old but it doesn't work with any other popular python libraries. (update: RHEL 5 and below is stuck with Python 2.4 apparently) Long term support is great and all but Red Hat can only support so much, the libraries and any other ecosystem that is part of that software or programming language will be dropped by group that are responsi…

It's hard to blame RH for that. Last time I checked, 2.5 was just released a few months before the first release of RHEL 5. Now they have software collections ( https://www.softwarecollections.org ) as a workaround, providing optional newer components.

I agree Red Hat is hardly the guilty one. I mean, RHEL based distros have a lot of plumbing and utilities written in Python, so it is unacceptable to upgrade system Python. Now, notice it's the system Python, the main reason of Python's existence in RHEL is the system utilities written in Python, providing Python language to customers is secondary to that. So there's no wonder nobody wants to touch it for reasons other than patching security issues, and users who try to run all the shiny Python libraries and frameworks using it should be banned from using Python ever again :) Just use a newer version for god's sake (and it's not that there isn't a dozen different way of getting a newer version).

(That being said, if obsolete version in RHEL fits the purpose of the user, that's great, and there is no reason for getting a new version, but it's wrong for those people to pressure developers for supporting old versions, and it's immoral for foss developers to continue supporting 10 year old releases at the expense of holding back progress. there was a post regarding that point lately, I'll try to find the link)

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#69
post #50

So, what speaks against a netinstall and what in favor of it? Frankly i would just get the DVD package, will i be missing any advantages?

DVD makes sense if you have a dvd player (!) and not a good internet connection. Netinstall are pretty reliable now.

Ok, good, Thanks!

So i basically won't be missing any important and hip packages? :D

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#70
post #50

So, what speaks against a netinstall and what in favor of it? Frankly i would just get the DVD package, will i be missing any advantages?

Depends what you're using it for. If you're putting Debian on a server, go with netinst, deselect everything in tasksel during the install and then apt-get only what you need post installation.

That way you start with a very lean < ~700MB base install with no unnecessary garbage on your system to worry about.

Post reply on HN