Debian 9.2 released

https://www.debian.org/News/2017/20171007

by 0x4542 • 9 years ago

234 117 9 years ago

debian.org

marmaduke• 9 years ago

I have the impression that Jessie came out recently. Is time speeding up?

Meanwhile I’m happy on CentOS 7 since many years now.

icebraining• 9 years ago

Jessie was released in April 2015 - Debian Stable releases are usually two years apart. CentOS 7.0 was released a bit less than a year before it (July 2014).

Jessie will still be supported until June 2018 by the official security team, and until 2020 by the Debian LTS project.

jmiserez• 9 years ago

Is time speeding up?

I ask myself that every day, certainly seems like it getting older ;-)

On a more serious note: It’s great that Linux is now sufficiently mature that even a 3 year old release is perfectly adequate and can do pretty much whatever you need. Maybe I’m misremembering here, but it didn’t always used to be like that.

susam• 9 years ago

Debian 9 Stretch came out recently (June 2017).

deadbunny2• 9 years ago

Debian switched to a more formal 2 year cycle for releases (similar to the Ubuntu LTS releases) from their "when it's ready" cycle they had before.

staticelf2• 9 years ago

When I run linux on servers, I always choose Debian. It is the best distro IMO. Glad to see that the project is still going as strong as ever!

gear54rus• 9 years ago

As someone who has been choosing CentOS for the same purpose, what would be some reasons for me to switch off the top of your head?

marindez• 9 years ago

As someone who hasn't used CentOS much, when I've had to use it I've found the package selection (packages/versions) to be lacking, requiring me to use one of the countless 3rd party repos that may or may not contain what I need

staticelf2• 9 years ago

Can't really come up with any reason, if you're happy with CentOS you should probably keep using CentOS.

I just started out with Ubuntu but realised that Debian seems to have more control over their packages and have a much more stable ecosystem which I value. Also .deb packages always seem to be available for basically any software distributed for linux and why make life hard?

buserror2• 9 years ago

I have a debian install that I've installed in 2001. It's clean, fully up to date and has never been reinstalled. It's not necessary. It had apache1 before, it had the old exim before, it had all kind of old packages and was gradually updated over the years. True, something like 'etckeeper' is a great boon these days.

Still, that's what I call a server distro ;-)

cjsuk2• 9 years ago

As a regular user of both and a prolific runner of CentOS in production, I would err towards Debian these days. It just feels better to me. Things like hanging updates applying SELinux policies, the whole Python mess and the lag between RHEL and CentOS patches (this has improved I will say) etc just sort of put me off CentOS a bit. It's also a lot lighter.

alfiedotwtf• 9 years ago

The stable community...

It really does feel like Debian will be one of the only distros we have at the moment that will still be around in a hundred years.

ClashTheBunny• 9 years ago

Batteries are included with Debian. I seem to always have to install things from EPEL (https://access.redhat.com/solutions/3358), which has a lower standard for support. Debian seems to have everything I need in main that I need and I rarely have to go to non-free or contrib. This helps me trust my system more. Both security and stability.

sergiosgc• 9 years ago

I switched from CentOS to Debian on servers three years ago. I'd give two reasons:

1) No need for EPEL and similar extra repositories. Debian is extremely comprehensive.

2) Rolling updates. We keep some servers in the stable release, some in the testing release. No hiccups on upgrade, yet.

Servers you keep on the stable channel will go through the same kind of upgrades you see on major CentOS versions. I never had a CentOS upgrade go smoothly; We'd usually just reinstall everything from config management. When Debian 8 came out, we opted for a distro-upgrade and everything was perfectly smooth. It took longer to go through change management (cycle out of production, test, slowly reapply load) than it took to actually upgrade the servers.

The servers we keep on testing are non-critical, and go through much more frequent distro-upgrade cycles. We had a couple bumps on the road, during the sysv init to systemd transition, but overall I still classify the distro as extremely solid and much better than our previous experience with CentOS.

brians• 9 years ago

When I switched around Red Hat 6 (not RHEL 6), the difference in quality of uninstall scripts and dependency management was stark: you can install and uninstall Debian packages without changes to your system. They test for this. If you need to tweak source, you can get build dependencies with one command, source with another, and build and install from your tweaked version with just one more.

dredmorbius• 9 years ago

Debian policy.

Package selection and packaging quality. The Debian aarchive is about 10x the size of CentOS / RHEL: 60k+ packages vs about 7k or so, as of a few years ago. I've not done a recent RHEL count.

jabl• 9 years ago

1) One reason would be that increasingly often, when you search for some rhel/centos problem, the solution is behind a paywall at access.redhat.com. Not that I blame RH, they are a commercial company and need to make money somehow. Or similarly, you get a search hit for bugzilla.redhat.com, but it turns out that the bug has been marked customers only, so you can't access it unless you have a RHEL subscription.

2) For major and minor releases, they are months behind RH. That may or may not be a problem for you, though.

3) Debian is less beholden to the interests of any one corporate entity (for better or worse), if that kind of thing appeals to you.

4) Debian has a huge number of packages, much more than CentOS + EPEL.

5) On the fly upgrade to the next release. Though in a professional setting where you have automated provisioning, reinstall isn't that much of a burden anyway.

That being said, both CentOS and Debian are very solid distros, you're not going wrong if you choose one of them.

kakwa_• 9 years ago

* Debian pushes security fixes really fast (I remember a local root exploit being patch in less than a day in debian while I waited a few more days on CentOS)

* The general tooling is far better, lately, for example, I played with the tools used to build packages in clean chroots of each distributions: mock for CentOS, cowbuilder for Debian, cowbuilder is a lot more powerful, copy on right support, ability to build several packages in parallel, more switches in the cli arguments... mock is far more limited even if it does the job. Also I love reportbug, even if it seems antiquated at first (bug tracker based on emails, wtf!?), it's really really really convenient as it automatically grabs the information regarding the buggy package (logs, version, dependencies version...) and let you simply review it.

* Debian as more packages available, even compared to CentOS+Epel

* Debian as backports if you really need newer versions of a package

* If you want/need to be on the bleeding edge, sid (or unstable) is a great rolling release.

* Debian does a better job at maintaining stable version of a given software (I remember a few years ago, CentOS/RHEL updated OpenLDAP server to the latest version, which broke my directory on my (dev, fortunately) infrastructure due to a change in configuration format, this never happened to me on Debian).

* If you have relatively clean upstream, packaging is nearly automatic on Debian thanks to all the dh_<helpers>

* at least until CentOS 6, yum was a slow and fragile beast IMHO, apt being more robust and less susceptible to corrupt its DB in case of crash or interruptions. It seems to have gotten better with CentOS 7 however and I never played with dnf.

On the minus side compared to CentOS:

* kickstart is a dream to use compared to preseed which is quite horrible, specially if you are trying to template it.

* The life span of a CentOS/RHEL is really long, +10 years for latest releases, which can be great for long, complex and slow projects, Debian in contrast is more on an EOL after ~5 years policy.

partycoder2• 9 years ago

A curious fact is that Debian name their releases after Toy Story characters.

Debian experimental is permanently named "sid" (the kid that breaks toys) and "stretch" (Debian 9) is a rubber octopus from Toy Story 3.

https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-releas...

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable#Which_Toy_Story_chara...

Other curious fact about Debian, is that there are 2 logos: the open use one, and the restricted use one. The restricted use one is a less known and includes a bottle.

jlgaddis4• 9 years ago

sid == unstable

evook2• 9 years ago

sid (still in Development)

squarefoot3• 9 years ago

For years I thought that the unstable release was named like that as a reference to Sid Vicious.

samueloph6• 9 years ago

I always like to point out the other two logos[1][2] that prefaced the buzz lightyears chin logo[3].

[1]http://ianmurdock.debian.net/index.html%3Fp=1880.html

[2]see "old logo" at https://www.debian.org/vote/1999

[3]https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81x4CGvFvNL...

smcl2• 9 years ago

I get an error for image 3 - what is the logo?

partycoder2• 9 years ago

I am glad they did not select the chicken logo.

lamby3• 9 years ago

Little known: the "experimental" distribution is called "rc-buggy", a pun on "release critical".

lamby3• 9 years ago

The restricted use one is a less known and includes a bottle.

It indeed is very very rarely used whatsoever these days. Even the "official" CD media (which used to be the only place where it was really seen in the past 10 years) don't really exist anymore.

jstimpfle6• 9 years ago

On a tangential note, I don't like how I get served the German version of the site with no obvious way to get the "canonical" one. And then I hate realizing how hard it is to combine support of multiple languages and still making everything transparent and accessible.

And also, what a huge effort it is to translate pages to different languages while (I think) almost everyone wants to read the English version.

jhasse• 9 years ago

There's a link at the bottom: https://www.debian.org/News/2017/20171007.en.html

jstimpfle6• 9 years ago

I actually looked for a while there (even Ctrl+f'ed) but somehow missed it. My bad. Still it's more of a nuisance to most people and I don't like how the standard URL does not deliver the same page to all.

fs111• 9 years ago

Send the correct language headers and stop complaining.

jstimpfle6• 9 years ago

What's the correct ones? The ones that the submitter of the thread had set? My native language? English? Does it depend on the topic?

JosephRedfern• 9 years ago

A huge effort, yes -- but probably worthwhile. You might be surprised about the number of non-english speakers; I know I was when visiting Italy and Portugal this summer (especially Italy). I suspect that we tend to live in "language bubbles".

jstimpfle6• 9 years ago

Yes, that will be true in general... In computer literate circles (like the ones browsing debian.org) there won't be many non English speakers, though.

squarefoot3• 9 years ago

"You might be surprised about the number of non-english speakers; I know I was when visiting Italy and Portugal this summer (especially Italy)."

As an Italian I have to agree with you; for us old timers it wasn't easy as English didn't become the official 2nd language over here until some decades ago. Both my parents and most relatives as an example knew some French but next to no English, so I had to learn it for myself. Luckily newer generations are getting much better integrated with the rest of the world language-wise; should you visit Italy again and need directions, asking to people in their 20s or 30s will probably be more effective.

kk_cz2• 9 years ago

This is determined by the settings in your browser. If you don't like getting German version as default, then change your browser config.

Not only you have links to different languages in the bottom of the site, you can even find a link to document describing how the standards works and how to change the settings in bunch of different browsers: https://www.debian.org/intro/cn

scrollaway• 9 years ago

And yet, a bunch of sites including Google don't give a rat's arse about the accept-language http header and do their own thing.

Wherever I travel, I get search results served in that language even though I have my browser consistently configured to want English.

mejin• 9 years ago

I don't mind that do much. What does really bother me is when I am on vacation and using incognito or another computer and all Google sites redirect me to the other countries one. Most of the time the only way to change to English is by logging in. Their capchas are even in the local language, making it really difficult for me to do what they want.

fehrm• 9 years ago

It is actually so frustrating that I decided to go with fedora in my latest trial. It changes every time you click a link, so even if you manage to find the correct link, one click and it is back to whatever language you have at top of browser setting.

freddref• 9 years ago

Time to upgrade my laptop

chj• 9 years ago

I wish Debian would adopt Ubuntu-like versioning number: "yy.mm". So easy to understand. Another good example is TeXLive, which simply uses "yyyy". Much better.

tonyedgecombe• 9 years ago

I wish most software would switch to this, I really don't like semantic versioning.

pvdebbe2• 9 years ago

Semantic versioning makes sense for libraries, not so much for user-facing applications.

vacri2• 9 years ago

Ubuntu has made the commitment for 6-month releases, so that makes sense for them. Debian releases "are ready when they're ready", so they can't predict the month (or even the year) ahead of time, and the version number is needed well before the release is made official.

rlpb2• 9 years ago

...and the version number is needed well before the release is made official.

Ubuntu developer here. No, the version number is not needed before the release. All our infrastructure only uses the codename until release, since the final version name is not known for certain in advance.

For example, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) was released late.

duskwuff• 9 years ago

That wouldn't work. Debian publishes minor updates to older release "branches"; naming those after the date they were released would make it impossible to distinguish the branches. For instance, Debian 9 was released in June 2017, followed by the release of 8.9 the next month as a minor update for users still running Debian 8.

BackToSchool• 9 years ago

Will it work on AMD promontory chipsets?

bovermyer2• 9 years ago

Does Debian have the same support for AWS eccentricities that Ubuntu now does?

lamby3• 9 years ago

Can you elaborate?

bovermyer2• 9 years ago

Up until March of this year, the Ubuntu kernel was not tuned for AWS. This included not having support for Elastic Network Adapter, which limited network speeds when compared to Amazon Linux.

See here: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/ubuntu-on-aws-gets-se...

Debian 9.2 released

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