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Today is Debian 8 release day

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Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#51

Post by bemused »

viccuad wrote: post #42
bemused wrote: post #7

dont wont to criticize any of the great & mainly voluntary work of the debian folks, but not quite sure how to interpret these statistics [1] looks like jessie is going to be the first debian stable to be released with rc-critical issues and not "when it's done" some of the bugs referred [2] seem quite critical indeed, maybe someone with more insight could comment on this? [1] http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/201…

Don't forget that the "Stable" definition for Debian is not the normal one, they are super zelous. Testing and Sid distributions are "stable" for the rest of distros. And remember that all those bugs on the Debian release are present in other distros, and they even don't acknowledge them sometimes.

sure, but thats exactly why I was asking - I am looking for some background on this decision and hoping that someone with more insight can share a link or something

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#52

Post by Silhouette »

kasabali wrote: post #43
Silhouette wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stabilit…

Best strategy is having a backup image and testing the upgrade procedure on a test machine beforehand, if possible. This release may be especially problematic because of the systemd change (it is possible to boot with sysvinit in Grub menu, but remote upgraders should beware). Did your last upgrade issues stem from the upgrade procedure or were they because of new versions?

Were your last problems stem from the upgrade procedure or were they because of new versions?

I can't remember all of the different problems now, but one I do remember is that if you had a typical set-up with mirrored (RAID1) drives but the boot-related partitions cloned rather than mirrored, one of the bootloaders got upgraded but not the other. That is, the drives were left out of sync and booting from one of the drives wouldn't work properly if the other failed. The thing that really concerned us wasn't so much the specific details here but that this was essentially a silent failure in the upgrade process, combined with a potentially catastrophic failure in a basic system function as a result.

I think there is quite a big difference between the theory of updating a couple of sources files and running a couple of upgrade commands and the practice of manually checking things like basic RAID configuration and reinstalling missing bootloader updates. This time around, the fact that Jessie uses systemd made the discussion for whether to even try a dist-upgrade a very short one, because literally everyone in the room agreed that the probability of failures was too high for that strategy to be worth considering. The substantial discussions were more about migration to fresh machines relatively soon vs. sticking with 7 at least until we know the LTS situation.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#53

Post by chdir »

As an AWS user, I switched from Amazon Linux to Ubuntu 14.04 because it's easy to replicate the development environment. No performance/stability issues so far however I'm curious if Debian 8 has an edge over Ubuntu 14.04 for a medium sized website on AWS. My only gripe with Ubuntu is that apt-get doesn't have the latest stables packages (like Amazon Linux does). I'm guessing it would be the same with Debian.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#54

Post by justincormack »

david-given wrote: post #27
davorb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All I care about is that stuff just works for as many years as possible, gets security updates and does not break I would go with FreeBSD or Debian.

Why not do both? https://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/

Because FreeBSD has really good community support and great documentation, while Debian kFreeBSD is a tiny community. And I really do not see the point - the GNU userspace is mostly available in ports if you want it on freebsd, but the FreeBSD userspace is generally as good.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#55

Post by zokier »

lmz wrote: post #46
digitalzombie wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 responsi…

It's hard to blame RH for that. Last time I checked, 2.5 was just released a few months before the first release of RHEL 5. Now they have software collections ( https://www.softwarecollections.org ) as a workaround, providing optional newer components.

> Last time I checked, 2.5 was just released a few months before the first release of RHEL 5

"Few months" being almost 6 months (Python 2.5 was released on September 19th 2006[1], Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (Tikanga), 14 March 2007[2])

[1] https://www.python.org/download/releases/2.5/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux#RHEL_5

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#56

Post by kasabali »

chimeracoder wrote: post #44
marcosdumay wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Took a quick look at some of the bugs that would affect me... It's systemd, systemd and systemd. Oh, yeah, that's Debian's systemd release.

> Took a quick look at some of the bugs that would affect me... It's systemd, systemd and systemd. > Oh, yeah, that's Debian's systemd release. These are the bugs that are relevant when talking about the Jessie release: https://udd.debian.org/bugs/?release=jessie_not_sid&merged=i... None of them are filed against systemd. I've been watching this page daily for the last month, and I only remember one systemd-related b…

> None of them are filed against systemd

But there are bugs in systemd integration if you look closely (hdparm resume issue and kde battery low issue are the ones which are on top of my mind.)

edit: Also you're looking at the wrong list :) Jessie is being released with these [0] RC bugs, and those [1] are the ones which are not fixed in jessie and sid.

[0]: https://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi?release=jessie&merged=ign&rc...

[1]: https://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi?release=jessie_and_sid&merge...

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#58

Post by chimeracoder »

chdir wrote: post #53

As an AWS user, I switched from Amazon Linux to Ubuntu 14.04 because it's easy to replicate the development environment. No performance/stability issues so far however I'm curious if Debian 8 has an edge over Ubuntu 14.04 for a medium sized website on AWS. My only gripe with Ubuntu is that apt-get doesn't have the latest stables packages (like Amazon Linux does). I'm guessing it would be the same with Debian.

> My only gripe with Ubuntu is that apt-get doesn't have the latest stables packages (like Amazon Linux does). I'm guessing it would be the same with Debian.

Depends on your definition of "stable". Since distros vary widely on what they consider to be "stable", comparing various distros' stable releases is like comparing processors by raw GHz values or dSLRs by megapixels alone.

Debian Stable is the last place to go if you want very recent builds of packages, but the first place to go if you want absolute, rock-solid stability.

Debian Sid (unstable) has the latest versions of each of the packages, though Debian's guidelines are strict enough that testing and sid are oftentimes more stable than the "stable" releases of other distros.

My advice (and this is what I do): Run Debian stable (Jessie, as of today) as a base image, and use an appropriate container for applications that require more up-to-date applications. Best of both worlds.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#59

Post by theg2 »

chdir wrote: post #53

As an AWS user, I switched from Amazon Linux to Ubuntu 14.04 because it's easy to replicate the development environment. No performance/stability issues so far however I'm curious if Debian 8 has an edge over Ubuntu 14.04 for a medium sized website on AWS. My only gripe with Ubuntu is that apt-get doesn't have the latest stables packages (like Amazon Linux does). I'm guessing it would be the same with Debian.

Debian does tend to run behind and prefer more stable and "mature" releases so I doubt you'll find what you're looking for with 8.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#60

Post by chousuke »

Silhouette wrote: post #52
kasabali wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best strategy is having a backup image and testing the upgrade procedure on a test machine beforehand, if possible. This release may be especially problematic because of the systemd change (it is possible to boot with sysvinit in Grub menu, but remote upgraders should beware). Did your last upgrade issues stem from the upgrade procedure or were they because of new versions?

Were your last problems stem from the upgrade procedure or were they because of new versions? I can't remember all of the different problems now, but one I do remember is that if you had a typical set-up with mirrored (RAID1) drives but the boot-related partitions cloned rather than mirrored, one of the bootloaders got upgraded but not the other. That is, the drives were left out of sync and booting from one of the d…

Am I understanding this correctly: instead of having the boot partitions configured as a (MD?) RAID set, you had somehow manually cloned them between two disks? A mirrored boot partition works just fine if you're legacy booting... With EFI I guess you have to do manual cloning (which is fragile) or rely on hardware RAID.

Did you use some tool to do that? How do you expect the upgrade process to even be able to take that kind of thing into account?

Without knowing any details it's hard to say if it was an actual bug or just plain old human error, but it sounds like the latter.

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