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posted by
cmn32480
on Thursday November 17 2016, @04:32PM
from the Duke-Nukem-Forever-of-operating-systems dept.
from the Duke-Nukem-Forever-of-operating-systems dept.
Debian has entered "Transition freeze".
Transition freeze ... means no new library transitions or package transitions that involve a large
number of packages.
Full freeze: Feb 5 2017.
As always, Debian 9 "Stretch" will be released "when it's ready".
Release Team Announcement
Release dates
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Debian Has Entered "Transition Freeze" for Squeeze
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Everything you know is wrong!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @05:19PM
Between systemd and dropping formerly supported arches, who is really focusing on debian anymore?
If you don't like systemd you're on devuan. If you need quick and easy installation and lots of packages you're on ubuntu (which yes debian is used as a basis for, although I am not sure how much anymore more given some of the package variations.) And if you're not using either, you are probably on Fedora/RHEL or OpenSUSE if you're running Novell apps.
And that is just the 'mainstream' peeps, not including all us niche distro users out there.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Unixnut on Thursday November 17 2016, @05:41PM
> If you don't like systemd you're on devuan. If you need quick and easy installation and lots of packages you're on ubuntu
And both draw heavily on Debian, neither are a pure fork, and rely on the core for stuff. Ubuntu less so than Devuan, but I know for a fact Ubuntu still tracks and uses Debian security repositories. This doesn't even touch all the niche distros that are based on Debian as well.
Much as I may lambaste them for their recent moves into systemD and other stuff, you cannot deny they are still quite important.
(Score: 3, Informative) by krait6 on Thursday November 17 2016, @05:56PM
Much as I may lambaste them for their recent moves into systemD and other stuff, you cannot deny they are still quite important.
BTW: on Debian systemd is installed by default at installation time, but it can be installed without systemd:
https://wiki.debian.org/systemd#Installing_without_systemd [debian.org]
or systemd can be removed after installation:
https://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/117634-gnu-linux-debian-without-systemd [spiceworks.com]
http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/How_to_remove_systemd_from_a_Debian_jessie/sid_installation [without-systemd.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @07:50PM
Do this still hold up in Squeeze?
And also, it is hardly installing without systemd. What is happening is that debian, with systemd, gets installed, and then an additional command is run that installs sysv. Because the two conflicts, apt will then strip out systemd again, and anything that depend on that specific package. You can't pick between systemd and sysv within the installer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @07:46PM
Could have sworn that Devuan is aiming to be self-sufficient at some point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @09:22AM
Might be. They also aimed to release a good 1.5 years ago ("This distribution should be ready about the time Debian Jessie is
ready"), see https://devuan.org/os/debian-fork/ [devuan.org]
I guess talk is cheap ;)
(Score: 3, Informative) by krait6 on Thursday November 17 2016, @05:43PM
Between systemd and dropping formerly supported arches, who is really focusing on debian anymore?
Having a quick look at http//distrowatch.com, the top 3 distributions are 1 Mint, 2 Debian, 3 Ubuntu -- so Debian and 2 Debian derivatives. Out of the top 25 listed, 10 are based on Debian. Debian is an important part of the free software ecosystem.
Edward Snowden has said so as well.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/03/20/0631230/snowden-what-happened-in-2013-couldnt-have-happened-without-free-software [slashdot.org]
One of the things I like seeing in our post-Snowden world is that Debian can be updated over Tor hidden services, which is not something I'm hearing much of when it comes to other free software distributions.
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/16/07/31/0017225/onion-debian-services-are-now-available [slashdot.org]
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday November 17 2016, @06:08PM
You might be surprised. Some stats [w3techs.com], for example, show Debian as the #2 Linux server distribution (actual measured numbers) with a little over 30% of the public Linux server space... Ahead of Fedora, Red Hat, Centos, and OpenSUSE.
The hundreds of developers and sysadmins [debian.org] who attended DebConf16 in South Africa this year are also great examples of those focused on Debian.
It might surprise you to learn that despite being this awesome thing made without systemd by Veteran Unix Admins, Devuan has had exactly zero release-quality versions, ever. In their so-called "Exodus Declaration" [devuan.org] back in 2014, the Devuan folks declared that:
But on the contrary, Debian is already starting the freezes for Stretch and Devuan still hasn't gotten their "Jessie" past beta test. Though they mention the word "stable" because that's what Debian calls Jessie, right now today their web site at devuan.org [devuan.org] leads off admitting that the current "Beta release marks an important milestone towards the sustainability and the continuation of Devuan as a universal base distribution." I.e. still beta.
I respect and appreciate what they're doing, and think's it's very important. And they have done a lot of work isolating and removing systemd and making a choice of init systems a reality. But the idea that Devuan is a systemd-free one-for-one replacement for Debian stable is just not the case.
Unless you don't trust Ubuntu [infoworld.com] after their automatic phone home scandal, and, more importantly, the way they blew it off as no big deal even as they reversed position. Shuttleworth even told critics to "chill out" and said that those concerned with privacy "are at maximum risk of having to eat their words later." I don't know what that even means, other than many people believe that it's important not to trust Ubuntu. Of course, lots of people also just don't like Ubuntu Unity [lecterror.com].
Things like this don't mean that Debian is for everyone, and they don't mean that Debian is the "best" or "#1" Linux distribution by any means... But they do keep interest focused on Debian that otherwise might not be.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Thursday November 17 2016, @06:47PM
I've commented on Devuan on several other threads, but basically my experience with the dev team (which admitly was when they were first getting started) was that we're going to do it "our own way" and bit the head off those who tried to copy the Debian infrastructure. I've taken a look since then and it seems they're still using jenkins but have cleaned up a lot of other stuff they were doing. What they had to do to make it realistic was simply setup buildd and dak, import the archive, then track again stable and make new source packages where necessary. I've done this type of rebranding when I worked on Xubuntu and for custom engagements. Instead, by reventing the wheel, well, you get the above.
I am happy to see that Debian at least can be extracted from systemd, though who can tell how long that will actually stay working.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday November 17 2016, @07:05PM
I don't know whether I am being naive or not, but it is my thinking that things like Debian/KFreeBSD and Debian/Hurd are super-valuable because they don't/can't use systemd, but use pretty much the rest of Debian. This makes me think that Debian will be separable from systemd for at least as long as those projects last.
(Score: 3, Informative) by urza9814 on Thursday November 17 2016, @08:00PM
They've already tried to drop Debian/KFreeBSD:
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/10/07/2313245 [soylentnews.org]
And Debian/Hurd is not actually released yet, so that would be even easier to drop. It's just an experimental development branch right now.
Mainline Debian devs probably aren't going to do much to keep those projects alive...it's more about the maintainers of those projects being dedicated enough to keep them going *despite* what the rest of Debian is doing.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @09:35PM
And this is my surprised face:
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday November 18 2016, @10:52PM
Debian/Hurd is unlikely to ever reach release-criteria anytime soon. I was involved with that project in my college days (and I learned a lot about kernel engineering from it), but the fact of the matter is that GNU mach is very slow because its using Mach messaging to do microkernel stuff, and that messaging is exceptionally slow (300-400ms per context switch last I checked). There are also large scale performance issues dealing with blocksize and such in many of the translators combined with the system being relatively sluggish overall.
Debian/kFreeBSD on the other hand has a lot of nifty things going for it, but because they switched from BSD libc to glibc, and tried to make it as much like other debian ports, it breaks a lot of things that assumes its stock BSD. For instance, jails for a long time were broken because the userland couldn't handle glibc. I'd be willing to use it if it was closer to BSD with a Debian userland, not a bastardized Linux distro with a BSD kernel.
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @07:54PM
Their goal is to be independent of Debian in the future, while your suggestion is to basically become beholden to the Debian backend.
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Friday November 18 2016, @02:37PM
Well, I'm using Devuan since the first alpha on my desktop, and had zero problems so far.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @06:06PM
it seems they're still using jenkins but have cleaned up a lot of other stuff they were doing
What have they cleaned up? When I took a look, nothing seems to have changed on the infrastructure side in the last year or so. Only rarely a package is updated (every few months according to the logs on ci.devuan.org [devuan.org]
To me it looks like development stopped, or very nearly stopped.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Thursday November 17 2016, @11:48PM
Despite Devuan still being officially beta, I've been running it ("ascii") for a long time now (probably over a year?), and I think I've had less issues than I did with Debian itself (pre-systemd I mean, post-systemd was just b0rked on my system).