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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”)?

#31

Post by CaliforniaKarl »

HEADLINE

Remove openssl1.0

DESCRIPTION

stretch made OpenSSL 1.1 the default openssl package. Unfortunately, OpenSSL 1.0 was kept around, since so many things depended on it.

There should now be enough time that a firm stance can be taken toward not allowing OpenSSL 1.0 in Debian Buster.

Once TLS 1.3 is finalized, OpenSSL 1.2 will be released with TLS 1.3 support. Not supporting TLS 1.3 in buster would (in my opinion) make Debian appear less in other people's eyes. That means supporting OpenSSL 1.2, and having three OpenSSL packages (1.0, 1.1, and 1.2) is too much for one distribution.

DISTRIBUTION

buster

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

#32

Post by marmaduke »

jl6 wrote: post #18

HEADLINE: Out of the box support for being run in VirtualBox. DESCRIPTION: I tested the stretch release candidates in VirtualBox, and while I did eventually get them working, I had to follow the instructions in several bug reports from across both the Debian and VirtualBox probably project websites. I don't mind following instructions, so if there is a reason why this can't be achieved seamlessly with zero configurat…

I seem to recall Jessie working fine as a VBox host. What did you run into?

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

#33

Post by bigon »

Dunedan wrote: post #4

HEADER Wayland as default display server DESCRIPTION X11 is aging, so it's time to switch to Wayland. It'd be cool if buster would ship with Wayland as default display server.

GNOME will more than probably be running in wayland as default in Buster

You can already try it in Stretch by selecting the proper option in GDM. I'm personally using wayland on both my desktop and (work) laptop for months

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

#34

Post by kofejnik »

raverbashing wrote: post #13
problems wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But ultimately isn't the first choice for most Python projects to date. So many scripts have python paths expecting python 2 hardcoded and pretty much everything that wants python3 calls python3. I'm firmly against this for compatibility reasons, it breaks too much.

Calling python3 for a python 3 binary is ok I don't see how older python 2 programs can be supported without updating the hashbang line in a Py3 default system (which is most of the time trivial) - you could also have a dedicated virtualenv for them as well which would work - and which would (looks like to) be an equivalent amount of work as changing the hashbang lines Switching to default Py3 is a breaking change an…

> Switching to default Py3 is a breaking change

Not only breaking, but also completely unnecessary

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

#35

Post by LukaD »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #28
Dunedan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To quote from the abstract of PEP394: > * for the time being, all distributions should ensure that python refers to the same target as python2 . > * however, end users should be aware that python refers to python3 on at least Arch Linux (that change is what prompted the creation of this PEP), so python should be used in the shebang line only for scripts that are source compatible with both Python 2 and 3. > * in prep…

That's just a recognition of the existence of that particular quirk of Arch, and that people may need to cope with that. It's remarkably painful, in practice, to deal with the one special distribution that makes "#!/usr/bin/python" do the wrong thing. And unfortunately, some other distributions don't have a "python2" or "python3" binary, making it painful to write portable scripts; you can't write "#!/usr/bin/python2…

Arch has had python2 and python3 binaries for a long time. /usr/bin/python2 has been there since at least 2010 https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/commit/trunk...

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

#36

Post by keithpeter »

- HEADLINE: Continue to provide a mechanism for offline installation of a large selection of the repository.

- DESCRIPTION: Debian is the only distribution that I know of that provides .iso images from which you can install the operating system and subsequently install a wide range of (libre) software. In addition, Debian provides update .isos. These affordances make installing and maintaining a desktop computer without an Internet connection, or with a slow and expensive connection, viable. I hope that Debian will continue to provide this affordance as we transition from optical disks over the next few releases.

- DISTRIBUTION: All Debian distributions.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: End user (desktop)

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

#37

Post by preek »

marmaduke wrote: post #32
jl6 wrote: post #18

HEADLINE: Out of the box support for being run in VirtualBox. DESCRIPTION: I tested the stretch release candidates in VirtualBox, and while I did eventually get them working, I had to follow the instructions in several bug reports from across both the Debian and VirtualBox probably project websites. I don't mind following instructions, so if there is a reason why this can't be achieved seamlessly with zero configurat…

I seem to recall Jessie working fine as a VBox host. What did you run into?

I'm running Debian boxes 100% of the time on VirtualBox since 4 years. I run macOS, but only as a host, I spend about 95% of my time within Debian boxes.

Never had a problem that Debian didn't run 'out of the box' within VirtualBox. Wouldn't even know what that entails.

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

#38

Post by avar »

HEADLINE: Better support for non-free firmware during installation

DESCRIPTION: Long-time Debian user here and free software supporter. One aspect where I don't have any practical choice for free software is my non-free iwlwifi firmware.

It's a huge PITA to install Debian like that when you don't have the fallback of a wired network. You provide "non-free" firmware packages, but these don't have the actual firmware! Rather they're dummy *.deb packages that expect to be able to download the firmware from the installer, which is of course a chicken & egg problem for WiFi firmware.

I end up having to "apt install" the relevant package on another Debian system, copy the firmware from /lib manually, copy it to a USB drive, then manually copy it over in the installer.

I understand that the Debian project doesn't want to distribute non-free firmware by default, but it would be great to be able to run a supported official shellscript to create an ISO image that's like the Stretch installer but with selected non-free firmware available on the image.

DISTRIBUTION: Stable on my server, testing on my laptop.

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

#39

Post by jopsen »

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: this isn't a debian specific issue, many open source projects has old infrastructure.

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

#40

Post by JdeBP »

preek wrote: post #37
marmaduke wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to recall Jessie working fine as a VBox host. What did you run into?

I'm running Debian boxes 100% of the time on VirtualBox since 4 years. I run macOS, but only as a host, I spend about 95% of my time within Debian boxes. Never had a problem that Debian didn't run 'out of the box' within VirtualBox. Wouldn't even know what that entails.

One thing that it entails is that the kernels available in Debian 8 backports are not compatible with the VirtualBox guest tools for Debian 8 that are published by Oracle. So one has to make the choice on Debian 8 between a kernel that supports version 2 control groups and having VirtualBox device drivers for things like the display.
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