Debian bullseye release planned on 2021-08-14 | Hacker News Reader

Debian bullseye release planned on 2021-08-14

lists.debian.org

47 pointspabs315 comments

For anyone new to Debian: it's a Linux-based operating system distribution, available at various levels of support for multiple computer architectures:

https://wiki.debian.org/SupportedArchitectures

Debian includes an extensive set of packages -- including communication and office tools -- that can be installed at the command-line or by using a desktop UI. This includes dependency management, so that installing (or removing) a package will also pull in (or can clear out) required and related packages.

https://www.debian.org/distrib/packages

The Debian distribution does not include any telemetry or tracking (although some packages within it may do), and it has a social contract to remain 100% free and to provide source code for almost all components (some non-free packages are available in cases where the authors are not willing or able to provide them openly):

https://www.debian.org/social_contract

I've probably misrepresented a few details there, but I think it's a marvel of the modern technical world, up there with the Internet Archive, and the Linux kernel.

That's not to say it's perfect - but the nice thing is that anyone can improve it at no financial cost (and in return, they get to experience that many people benefit from reduced costs - time, frictional, and economic).

It isn't true that Debian does not include telemetry; there is the package popularity contest, and also the cross-distro hardware database (but both are opt-in):

https://popcon.debian.org/ https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php https://wiki.debian.org/Hardware/Database https://linux-hardware.org/

Unfortunately there are also many other privacy issues with many packages in Debian, but we welcome help finding more and fixing all the issues:

https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues

>Chromium suddenly starts downloading a binary blob

>A Debian bug that was filed at the end of May serves as a reminder that even open-source software is not immune to some of the problems of proprietary software. In this case, Chromium 43 was silently downloading a browser extension to enable the "OK Google" voice activation "feature" of the browser

Oh shit, that's scary...

Thank you for the correction, and I don't remember seeing the PrivacyIssues page before - that's a useful resource. Looking forward to reading a bit more about popcon & hwdb as well.

So I actually write some software that would be in violation of their ICE policy and I’m not sure how I’d remedy it. I could just not have defaults in my config file but my users have no idea what a STUN server is and there doesn’t seem to be a system location like for DNS.

I could print a message like “you need to configure some ICE stuff, if you don’t know what these are then use xxx” but that seems worse for users. Now they have to do work so be in the same place privacy wise.

To be clear, the ICE policy isn't an agreed-on Debian-wide opinion, it was just added to the page by a Debian contributor who is concerned about it.

I agree with their concern that hard-coded STUN servers are a potential issue, since the user is not in control of where their traffic goes and whether or not they trust that location.

I agree the suggested best practice doesn't work great for software with a non-technical audience.

Perhaps there needs to be a public ICE pool like the public NTP pool as well as a shared list of known public ICE servers that each software needing stun servers could depend on. Then you could say "cannot contact $foo directly [info link about IPv6, NAT etc], who would you like to try to contact them via?" followed by a list "volunteers" (the pool), Google/Ekiga/GNUnet/Mozilla/etc, custom.

Debian stable is a great choice for a system where you need stability and security. For regular desktop usage though, Debian Sid (unstable) may be better because you get newer software.

There is only one issue I had with Debian: I don't like/understand how it's package manager handles unneeded software.

For example:

1. I installed Debian with the Gnome interface.

2. Decided to try KDE, installed it alongside Gnome.

3. Deleted KDE. But then there still were lots of KDE-related packages left. I tried `apt autoremove` and some other stuff, but no matter what I couldn't figure out how to easily remove all unneeded packages and return to the previous state.

This has been a problem for a long time. I'm not sure why other distributions are better at this than Debian, but I think it has something to do with how Debian splits up software in much more packages than other distributions. Maybe it's more difficult to keep track of the state?

If you have found a package and you don't know why apt-get autoremove doesn't remove it, try: apt-cache rdepends --installed pkgname

Thanks, I'll try that.

I think ‘aptitude why’[1] will also tell you why a package is installed and is easier to remember.

[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch02.en....

This makes me wonder how you installed KDE. If it was by installing a single top-level package (e.g. kde-standard or maybe kde-plasma-desktop), then I would expect apt autoremove on that package to just work. (Unless you later manually installed more packages that shared some dependencies with the top-level package, in which case you would have to remove those as well.) APT distinguishes between manually-installed and automatically-installed packages for exactly this reason.

It also distinguishes config from other files. By default, it will keep modified config files when you remove packages. That way you don't accidentally delete the custom web site definitions that took you hours to create. You can use --purge to override this conservative behavior.

Debian's packaging system isn't the simplest, but I find it to be reliable, good at dealing with edge cases and failures, and extraordinarily well documented. It's part of why I switched to debian-based distros well over a decade ago.

The /var/log/apt/history.log file should have a full list of the installed packages, which you can copy-paste to remove.

This is likely because by default Recommends and Suggests both prevent autoremovals and there are probably some circular depends/recommends/suggests loops preventing removing things. The APT::AutoRemove::RecommendsImportant and APT::AutoRemove::SuggestsImportant options can be used to disable this behaviour, so you could try the Suggests one first. Adding the Recommends one would autoremove lots of other stuff too though.

Another thing you could do next time is list all packages (apt list) before and after, then diff the lists to see what was added/removed/upgraded and manually revert that.

They barely got Python 3.0 in before the code freeze. Whew! That was a close call.

They never got it, Wheezy was the first release including Python 3 with version 3.2

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