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

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

#171

Post by tkinz27 »

miclill wrote: post #147

- HEADLINE: Not start services by default - DESCRIPTION: If I installed e.g. postgresql I would prefer it not starting automatically by default. I would rather like a message: If you want x to start on boot, type 'update-rc.d enable x' - DISTRIBUTION: (Optional) [stable] - ROLE/AFFILIATION: (software dev, mostly web)

I can't thumbs up this enough. Packages that start services when they are installed can cause so many issues between not giving the user the chance to fully configure them, to weird interactions with distributed applications talking to each other before all the configuration is ready.

This is definitely one of the defaults that I think RPM gets right over debian packages.

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

#175

Post by hsivonen »

oneplane wrote: post #162
hsivonen wrote: post #50

HEADLINE: Repurpose testing as a rolling release positioned for not-just-testing usage DESCRIPTION: There are users who'd like to use a non-corporate community distro but who don't need or want software to be as old as software in Debian stable. The standard answer is "use testing" (e.g. http://ral-arturo.org/2017/05/11/debian-myths.html ), but 1) security support for testing is documented to be slower than for stabl…

A problem would be the security updates. You can't really spend even 'more' people on security updates for a rolling release. The frequency of updates would be too high for this to work. This is also the reason for only stable (and olstable?) getting security updates. The thing is that if you want to support something, you'll need to scope it. You can't support just any random thing, you'd need an army of maintainers…

Having security support for renamed testing would be more work than now but not the kind of work security support for stable is. Security support for stable involves backporting fixes. For a rolling release it would mean expedited pushes of upstream versions with security fixes in them.

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

#176

Post by simias »

avar wrote: post #71
hsivonen wrote: post #50

HEADLINE: Repurpose testing as a rolling release positioned for not-just-testing usage DESCRIPTION: There are users who'd like to use a non-corporate community distro but who don't need or want software to be as old as software in Debian stable. The standard answer is "use testing" (e.g. http://ral-arturo.org/2017/05/11/debian-myths.html ), but 1) security support for testing is documented to be slower than for stabl…

> rename testing to something with a positive > connotation that doesn't suggest it's for > testing only. Isn't unstable what you want to use? The reason it's called "testing" is because it's a branch of Debian that's "in testing for stable". IIRC packages have to be 2 weeks in unstable without bugs before migrating to testing. So it's explicitly not a bleeding edge release, but a preparation release for the next sta…

I always run "testing" because every time I try to run "stable" on the desktop I always end up with an outdated package that limits me one way or an other. A missing driver, missing functionality etc...

On the other hand "unstable" is way too unstable when you need a reliable environment in my experience. Packages breaking randomly etc... Completely expected of course, but I can't take that bet on a work computer for instance.

So as far as I'm concerned on the desktop "debian testing" is the one true debian. I don't even try to install stable first anymore since I'm certain I'll end up moving to testing eventually, I directly ask the setup to use the testing repos.

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

#177

Post by mixmastamyk »

pwdisswordfish wrote: post #89

HEADLINE: Easier way to create local packages DESCRIPTION: My first distro was Debian. Then, for a while, I used Arch. But it kept irritating me with its total disregard for backwards-compatibility (symlinking /usr/bin/python to python3), coarse-grained packages (want to install QEMU PPC without pulling in every other architecture as well? too bad!), lack of debug packages (good luck rebuilding WebKit just to get sta…

Maybe snaps can fill this role, I understand they are easier to create.

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

#178

Post by bodhammer »

- HEADLINE: Support for LXD (And LXC 2.0)

- DESCRIPTION: XD isn't a rewrite of LXC, in fact it's building on top of LXC to provide a new, better user experience. Under the hood, LXD uses LXC through liblxc and its Go binding to create and manage the containers. It's basically an alternative to LXC's tools and distribution template system with the added features that come from being controllable over the network.

- DISTRIBUTION: Stable

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Enthusiast and wanna be developer

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

#179

Post by majewsky »

pwdisswordfish wrote: post #89

HEADLINE: Easier way to create local packages DESCRIPTION: My first distro was Debian. Then, for a while, I used Arch. But it kept irritating me with its total disregard for backwards-compatibility (symlinking /usr/bin/python to python3), coarse-grained packages (want to install QEMU PPC without pulling in every other architecture as well? too bad!), lack of debug packages (good luck rebuilding WebKit just to get sta…

If you just want to pack up a bunch of config files, I can shamelessly plug my own https://github.com/holocm/holo-build

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

#180

Post by [deleted] »

esjeon wrote: 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.

[deleted]
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