
A proposal for an always-releasable Debian - cpeterso
https://lwn.net/Articles/550032/
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zokier
I must wonder why Debian needs to do 10 months of developing/bugfixing
software in the first place. I mean most of the software is already supposedly
"stable" releases from upstream, is it not? Maybe Debian should focus on
working closer to upstream developers so that the software would be more
directly usable out-of-the-box.

~~~
e12e
It's not so much the individual packages, it's the interaction between them,
and dependencies. In this release, we got multiarch, which is quite an
overhaul in how cross-compilation works (especially relevant for running
32-bit (often binary only, non-free) software under the amd64 architecture.

There are such issues as which version of libxml, libopenssl and even glibc
certain packages work with (or especially, do _not_ work with).

So, eg nginx upstream might test (mostly) against an upstream release of
openssl and some libc, while the apache web server might be more conservative
(this is a made up example, tomcat, especially legacy versions such as 6,
might be a better example than apache httpd).

~~~
justincormack
Multiarch took so long to ship that most of the proprietary binaries are now
available in 64 bit. It is still marginally useful.

The testing issue is a big problem as up streams often have poor tests but
that is an upstream issue really. Maybe the best solution is to provide CI
frameworks for upstream to use that support current and future Debian versions
easily (something like Travis but with more OS versions).

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antihero
I dislike how "LAMP" is considered a first class citizen, still. Why is "LAMP"
preferable to things like nginx, PostgreSQL, Python, Ruby, or other now
extremely popular alternatives?

~~~
petsos
Debian is a distribution for bureaucrats. For installations that are just
being maintained. If you are anything close to hacker do yourself a favor and
use something else.

~~~
mwcampbell
Hackers also appreciate having a stable, even conservative, foundation on
which to build, especially when it's time to put a service in production,
scale it to multiple servers, and keep up-to-date with security patches.

There is nothing to stop Debian users from using Rails, Django, Node.js, or
any of the other alternatives to LAMP. SOme of them are even packaged in
Debian.

~~~
fixxer
I'm running LMDE and I've got all the goodies by default. If there is
something else that the package manager doesn't cover, I do this amazing
thing... I download the source and make! Crazy, I know.

~~~
petsos
Save the lecturing, you can do this in virtually any OS.

~~~
fixxer
To be accurate, it was sarcasm, not lecturing.

This is lecturing: "If you are anything close to hacker do yourself a favor
and use something else."

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mwcampbell
The concept of reference installations reminds me of Ubuntu main versus
universe, or the main RHEL repository versus Fedora's EPEL repo. Makes sense
to me. Perhaps Debian should use separate repositories too, so the difference
is highly visible when we browse packages.

~~~
e12e
Well, technically, there is already "contrib". I guess it _is_ a little crazy
to have as many packages in "main" as there is. Impressive, yes, but also a
little crazy :-)

~~~
e12e
Now that backports is part of Debian, I think most of the issues with "out of
date" packages are much less painful than they used to be. I suppose factoring
main into "core" and "non-core", would make maintaining backports easier too -
you could then test building a package against a smaller set of core packages
and libs.

Packages needing newer versions of glibc, automake/autoconf,
gcc/clang/ruby/python/perl etc are still tricky though.

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popee
Just two things.

Debian guys should really do something like OpenBSD package flavors. Sometimes
you just don't need X,Y or Z support and it's pain to do this kind of stuff
with Debian. I'm not sure if that is even possible in such rigid package
managemenet system. Other thing would be to allow files/libs as dependencies.
Those two things would give people more freedom and flexibility, but they are
from start trying really hard to be anal with packages (even given the fact
that .deb system is , at the same time, best and worst thing about Debian).
So, guess, just forget about it.

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dangayle
First thing I do whenever I install a fresh Debian copy is swap out stable for
testing so I can get Python 2.7, then add the official repos for nginx.

~~~
laymil
Now that Wheezy is Stable, you shouldn't have to do the first step.

