Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrmondo | Hacker News Reader

I'm not completely disagreeing with you but Debian in recent years has taken massive steps backwards as far as production stability. Jessie for example did not ship with SELinux enabled which was a key deliverable for Jessie to be classed as stable / ready for production, what's worse is it doesn't ship with the require SELinux policies - again another requirement before it was to be marked as stable, it's filled with out of date packages (you know they're old when they're behind RHEL/CentOS!) and they settled on probably the worst 3.x kernel they could have.

View on HN

You've given one example; SELinux. Did wheezy ship with SELinux enabled? No. So how is that a step backwards? It would have been a step backwards if they shipped with it enabled and it was half-assed. SELinux is notoriously hard to get right across the board. See how many Fedora solutions start with "turn off SELinux." Shipping jessie without SELinux enabled was the right thing to do, if the alternative was: not shipping jessie; or shipping borked jessie with borked SELinux support on by default. Those who know what they are doing can turn it on with all that entails.

You gripe about kernel 3.16 LTS but provide no support for your statement. With a cursory search I can't find any. If it was such a big deal I have to assume I would. For my part I use Jessie on the desktop and server and have not encountered these mysterious kernel problems of which you complain. Again, you may have wished for some reason that they shipped with 3.18 or 4.x, but they shipped. They have 10 official ports and 20K+ packages to deal with, I'm sorry they didn't release with your pet kernel version. Again, those who know what they are doing can upgrade jessie's kernel themselves if they are wedded to the new features.

So, massive steps backwards?

Unfortunately, nobody has stepped for SELinux maintainance. If this is important for you, you should help to maintain those policies.

All your remaining points are vague at best.

Oh believe me, we did try to contribute to Debian, in recent years the community has aged poorly and become toxic and hostile, where the Redhat / CentOS community has grown, is more helpful and we have found them to be more accepting of people offering their time than ever.

Most people I have spoken to about this say exactly the opposite. In 2014, the project even ratified a Code of Conduct [0].

The only major contentious issue I can recall was the systemd-as-default-init discussion, but that was expected.

[0] https://www.debian.org/code_of_conduct

I genuinely don't know about what toxicity and hostility you are speaking of. Any pointer?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com