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Today is Debian 8 release day

release.debian.org

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Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#31

Post by mmarx »

johnchristopher wrote: post #16

That's not an official release statement. It's a month old mail stating Debian targeted today as a release date for Debian 8 (edit: latest news item in the list).

How about a mail[0] on the mirror announce mailing list from half an hour ago?

“As you are probably already aware of, Debian 8.0 "jessie", is just a few hours away from becoming the next stable release. This is a heads up in case you were not aware of, as there is probably going to be a higher load on the mirrors.”

[0] https://lists.debian.org/debian-mirrors-announce/2015/04/msg...

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#32

Post by kasabali »

justincormack wrote: post #26
xyby wrote: post #9

I have some legacy linux servers that need an update to a new OS. Is Debian 8 a good choice? All I care about is that stuff just works for as many years as possible, gets security updates and does not break.

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

This is incorrect. stable releases are supported until one year after the new stable release, which happens to be ~3 years, so it's 2018 for jessie. If LTS project also decides to support it, it extends to 2020.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#35

Post by kasabali »

xyby wrote: post #28
justincormack wrote: post #26

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.

> Wow, really? That's nothing! No security updates after that?

First of all, it's 2018, not 2017. For the latter point, there is now a LTS project, which provides +2 year after offical support ends, but they only support squeeze for now (since wheezy is on offical support and jessie is not released) and AFAIK it's not decided yet if jessie will be supported by LTS or not. So it may extend to 2020.

If you want certainty on this regard Ubuntu LTS is also a pretty good choice.

On CentOS, I don't use it so I can't comment on it in depth, but beware that number of offically supported packages are much smaller compared to Debian, so make sure the packages you want to use are supported. (There are semi-offical/unoffical repositories, but they may not be maintained as well as offical packages.) (Actually that same point applies to Ubuntu also, as only main and restricted archives are supported by Canonical and universe/multiverse is where big number of packages reside in.)

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#36

Post by silb »

xyby wrote: post #25
keithpeter wrote: post #18

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?

Debian has a separate long term support project [1] for old stable release that provide security patches beyond the 2-3 years of official support.

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/LTS

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#38

Post by digitalzombie »

xyby wrote: post #28
justincormack wrote: post #26

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.

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 responsible for it. That was my take away from the post/user comments.

In general Debian is pretty rock solid imo and as a good system admin you should stay a version or two behind and you should be pretty set imo. Waiting until 2024 is crazy in term of updates and such, I rather go OpenBSD route if you want to go that long.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#39

Post by Silhouette »

kasabali wrote: post #34
butwhy wrote: post #11

How safe is a dist-upgrade from 7.8 to 8?

Debian upgrades are pretty reliable (IMHO best among linux distros) but I can't guarantee you won't have problems in your particular setup :)

Counterpoint: Upgrading from 6 to 7, every single machine I use, from a home server to various professionally managed machines at work, had at least one serious problem. RAID and bootloaders raised a few issues for example. We got everything working eventually, but the amount of wasted time even with very experienced sysadmins looking after some of those machines was silly.

Debian is generally very good with stability for things like security updates and we certainly plan to continue using it. However, our plans for updating this time are more along the lines of "set up completely new machine with Debian 8 from the start, install our own choice of packages and applications, and then systematically migrate data/connectivity from the old systems to the new ones". We expect the time and money costs of having the transition period to be less than the potential downtime if direct upgrades take as much effort as they did from 6 to 7.

Your mileage may vary, Linux has infinite possibilities and ours may just have been unlucky, the plural of anecdote is not data, etc.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#40

Post by aruggirello »

viyyer wrote: 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 one of the three above.

Edit: the fact they're using this event mainly to promote Azure services rather than talking about differences/upgrading issues from debian 7 to 8 speaks of itself.

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