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Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

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131–140 of 329 posts

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

#131
HEADLINE: More fine grained meta packages as community recommendations.

DESCRIPTION: There are a few Debian meta packages but they are really broad. Example: it would be great if there were a few developer leaning packages grouped into one meta package.

For instance, I always install etckeeper, apt-listchanges and apt-listbugs. I think anyone following testing or unstable would want to install those and I'm not aware of any real alternatives to those. I can't imagine using unstable without apt-listbugs to warn you when there high priority bugs in the packages that were already uploaded.

DISTRIBUTION: mixture of testing/unstable.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

#132
HEADLINE: nginx-rtmp support in Debian

DESCRIPTION: At https://fosdem.org , we are using the nginx rtmp module intensively. It seems it is becoming a de facto standard when an in-house streaming server is preferred, as opposed to an external streaming platform. It combines excellently with ffmpeg, the recently pacakged voctomix and several components of the gstreamer framework, to create an excellent FOSS video streaming stack. Some debconf video people too seem to be interested. Some positive interest from Debian nginx pacakagers. Unfortunately, no clear way forward yet.

Hopefully, Buster opening up might create some opportunities to get things going again!

SEE ALSO: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=843777#23

DISTRIBUTION: Debian 10 stable & Debian 9 backports.

ROLE/AFFILIATION: http://fosdem.org staff (= all year round volunteer), responsible for video streaming & recording since FOSDEM 2017

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

#133
Eliminate all the scripts that go into a package, moving them to runtime. This is the only way to eliminate instability caused by buggy scripts that then prevent upgrades.

Also get rid of all interactivity during install and upgrade. It's deadly for managing big fleets.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

#134

HEADLINE: Full audit of what's in "standard" and "important" DESCRIPTION: There have been numerous detailed analyses posted to debian-devel that go through every package in standard and important and list out which ones shouldn't be. However, actual changes have only ever been made here on a point-by-point basis. (I've managed to get a dozen or so packages downgraded to "optional" and out of the default install by fi…

Please check https://wiki.debian.org/BusterPriorityRequalification, https://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/EssentialOnDiet and https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/Spec/ImportantField.

We should discuss some of this at some point on debian-devel.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

#135
post #61
post #39

HEADLINE: Lower barrier for contributors DESCRIPTION: Have a git repo for each package with a simple issue tracker, like GitHub/gitlab, a flow for accepting pull-requests and automated CI. Also move away from message boards and IRC to more user friendly tools. Currently, it's too hard to report bugs, inspect debian source packages, propose fixes, etc. The overhead to making a simple contribution is too high. Note: th…

Yes. See that KDE makes this easy with bug reporting built in to applications and desktop tools.

Debian has reportbug and reportbug-ng.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

#136
post #6

HEADLINE: Stabilize dpkg C library (libdpkg) DESCRIPTION: Any plans to go ahead and stabilize the dpkg library for buster? Having access to a stable package management library is essential in our software. Ie. being able to verify package signatures and querying the database for files. Both of which are not supported. DISTRIBUTION: buster

This has been part of the dpkg roadmap for some time now (https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/RoadMap). And something I'm slowly but progressively moving towards. But TBH it has been low priority. Knowing of projects that require it, and specifically which parts, or that are already using the static libdpkg library are very valuable, so that those parts can be improved.

If there's enough interest, my plan could be to expose just a subset of the current libdpkg as a shared library for buster.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

#137
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fedora/RHEL also has transactional package operations via their package-manager, `dnf`. One of the reasons I'd prefer not to go back to apt-based distros.

Thanks, I didn't know that. Does Fedora also have transactional rollbacks?

Yep, all installations and upgrades are transactional, and can be undone or rolled-back transactionally

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

#138
post #80

- HEADLINE: Easier DEB repository creation. - DESCRIPTION: Creating a custom remote/local/CD/DVD repo or a partial mirror is simply a nightmare, mainly because package management internals are poorly documented. There are many tools developed to just solve this problem, but most of them aren't actively maintained. Aptly seems like the best right now, but is way much complicated and inflexible.

I agree this is currently a problem, the solutions are currently either too heavy weight, or too limited ( https://wiki.debian.org/DebianRepository/Setup).

What I've been wanting to do is to add a better alternative to the dpkg suite, something that can generate a fully functional repo, matching current standards, something like a dpkg-genrepository or similar (which would supersede dpkg-scanpackages and dpkg-scansources, and perhaps even major parts of mini-dak, which would avoid the need to rewrite it from scratch).

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

#139
HEADLINE: Easy way to use multiple screens with different DPI

DESCRIPTION: Many laptops (e.g. Macbook Pro) come with retina screens, but most of us use 'regular' monitors. Even after setting org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor and playing with xrandr, it can be difficult or impossible to get a single external non-retina display set up in the right position and without one screen containing tiny text (or huge text).

Being able to make it work at all, and persist after a reboot, would be great. Having per-monitor scaling in the Display settings panel (or in 'Arrange Combined Displays') would be amazing.

DISTRIBUTION: I've experienced this with jessie. I haven't tried with stretch.

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