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Today is Debian 8 release day

release.debian.org

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Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not at all, devuan is not considered trustworthy by the majority (to put it mildly).

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#93
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…

Because there is no porting to Linux. They could port to Debian, or Ubuntu, or Red Hat, or Mint, or Slackware, or Gentoo, or Trisquel, or any number of distributions. I wouldn't expect them to put the source under an Open Source and/or Free Software license and upload to SourceForge (or GitHub or Savannah or CodePlex or etc. etc. &c) so that people could adapt and package for their favorite distribution, but that would be the most open way of doing things.

Just the fact that they're allowing the Linux cancer[0] to infect their platform is a huge step forward for them. It's coming at the time where it's feasible for many organizations to completely rid themselves of MS products. Goodness knows I'm seeing what it takes at my place of work (it's mostly political at this point, but there are one or two technical issues to work out). Besides, what would you expect to hear from them other than a pitch for their own products? I doubt Debian 8 is going to actually release today anyway, although I'm looking forward to it.

[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20010606035140/http://suntimes.c...

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#94
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…

Hellbanned again :) that's fine guys, really.

Because there is no porting to Linux. They could port to Debian, or Ubuntu, or Red Hat, or Mint, or Slackware, or Gentoo, or Trisquel, or any number of distributions. I wouldn't expect them to put the source under an Open Source and/or Free Software license and upload to SourceForge (or GitHub or Savannah or CodePlex or etc. etc. &c) so that people could adapt and package for their favorite distribution, but that would be the most open way of doing things.

Just the fact that they're allowing the Linux cancer[0] to infect their platform is a huge step forward for them. It's coming at the time where it's feasible for many organizations to completely rid themselves of MS products. Goodness knows I'm seeing what it takes at my place of work (it's mostly political at this point, but there are one or two technical issues to work out). Besides, what would you expect to hear from them other than a pitch for their own products? I doubt Debian 8 is going to actually release today anyway, although I'm looking forward to it.

[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20010606035140/http://suntimes.c...

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#95
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian 8 has support until 2017. Ubuntu 1404 LTS has support until 2019. RHEL 7 has support until 2024 (and Centos).

> Debian 8 has support until 2017 Wow, really? That's nothing! No security updates after that? > Ubuntu 1404 LTS has support until 2019 That sounds more reasonable. But still a bit short. > RHEL 7 has support until 2024 (and Centos). Interesting. Now I understand why I hear "centos" so often lately. So far, I only know Debian based distros. I wonder how much work it would be to switch to one of these two.

Keep in mind that you can upgrade debian and ubuntu pretty nicely to a new release but not RHEL, afaik. That's a major pain point. I'd go with Debian.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#96
post #88
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who dislike systemd can take a look at http://without-systemd.org .

Any idea how long Debian wheezy will continue to receive security bug fixes?

There's no set schedule, but the previous release generally continues to receive security updates for about a year after the release of a new version. See https://wiki.debian.org/DebianOldStable.

(This assumes that Debian doesn't decide to declare Wheezy as a new LTS release once support for Squeeze ends in February 2016... AFAIK it's not clear what their plans are there.)

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#97
post #86
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS is only open in so far that it aligns with their business plans. They have a long term plan for Azure and need more .Net developers for it. Hence making .Net more attractive by opening it up. Does not mean they will open up other things.

This seems to be their strategy but it could backfire. Once Windows developers and enterprises start using Linux and other clouds instead of Windows Server and Azure, we might see the old MS again.

Azure is twice the price of Google for compute (VM). Azure was really a PaaS and it still shows. They really hope you bring you in on using their software, not just the VM aspect. I'm not overly convinced, but it is probably a decent strategy. Some folks will say "hey I need a message queue" and use Azure's instead of hosting in a VM. Lock in. Azure is even doing this for stuff like Redis, I suppose to get more people on the idea of using hosted software vs machines. In fact their infrastructure offerings are pretty weak (like SSD, or networking).

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#98
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?

Yes, RHEL has 10 year support periods. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is commercial - you pay an annual subscription for updates.

CentOS/Scientific Linux/Springdale Linux are free clones with free updates. Oracle Linux is a free download, but not sure how updates work. Current is version 7 with support until 2024.

http://centos.org/

PS: if you are asking this kind of question here, you might want to take your local Linux sysadmin for coffee and explain your use cases, applications, hardware spec and likely traffic in detail.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#99
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, sid/unstable tends to have the latest releases of upstream software (golang, docker, redis? ... I can't think of any great examples), but I've found that Ubuntu's packaged versions of upstream software often lags behind by quite a distance, even in the latest branch (eg. in next, unreleased, say 15.10 tree). I can't say why that is, but I've seen it on multiple occasions. Usually you can resolve th…

> I can't say why that is, but I've seen it on multiple occasions. Because Ubuntu releases are, well, releases. Early in the release cycle, they sync from Debian, they package their own things, then freeze the versions and release. They don't change versions of most packages in released! releases. Debian unstable on the other hand, has no concept of a release, so maintainers upload new versions of packages into unsta…

What you're saying makes sense, except that I would expect 15.10 to always be more current than it is before 2015-10 arrives. In reality, it's often not more current than the released version. If there is a new version of a package in sid, why isn't it in the "bleeding edge" ubuntu next-release? (I'm sure it's a good reason)

In Debian, actually, I am pretty sure there's never really a freeze in unstable as you mention. They make a new stable release from the testing branch some time (a good long while) after the freeze is called, then for a brief period you have only stable and unstable (and oldstable), and later on a new testing branch is created (not yet frozen) with whatever packages from unstable meet the criteria to go into testing.

When testing is not frozen, that means "the package has been in unstable for 2 weeks without any reported bugs" or something like that. When they're getting ready for a new release, they freeze testing, and then the criteria to get your package in for the next release gets more stringent (is it, bugfixes only? security issues only? I'm not sure, but it's probably even stricter than I think.)

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#100
post #88
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who dislike systemd can take a look at http://without-systemd.org .

Any idea how long Debian wheezy will continue to receive security bug fixes?

At least long enough to decide which Linux distro to use in the future.

Unfortunately many distros have already jumped on the systemd wagon but I think soon there will be a increasing collection of non-systemd alternatives which will continue to follow the KISS principle which made Unix and Linux so great. There already _are_ alternatives to systemd and systemv -- launchd and upstart (used by ChromeOS) for instance.

I hope soon we will have an init system which takes the best of all current ones while still following the KISS principle. Linux must keep this principle alive unless it will probably fall into the trap of Windows' monolithic bug hell. Ironically Linux 3.11 kernel was already called "Linux for Workgroups" :-)

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