A proposal for an always-releasable Debian [LWN.net]

A proposal for an always-releasable Debian

Posted May 10, 2013 17:17 UTC (Fri) by sstsalazar (guest, #90864)
Parent article: A proposal for an always-releasable Debian

Although everyone would love to have that, I doubt that everything would be applicable in a sane and efficient way in short time.I agree that some refactoring would probably make the development of Debian 8 or 10 more pleasant to the users,though.

Maybe, I dare say, it would be interesting to rethink how complex systems like DEs are organized. Most of the annoyances users have are caused by Mozilla's,Xorg`s, KDE's, Gnome's, LibreOffice's and etc products, mostly because, sometimes even in Sid, their packages are affected by a huge lag when we consider mainstream.

A platform like lauchpad/ppa, which would allow one to smoothly add repositories with newer packages, would not only be interesting, but would be game-changing for some users. Allowing the end-users to get some love in those cold winter nights that the freezes carries with them would, probably, please all sides and help to gather even more users back to Debian.

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A proposal for an always-releasable Debian

Posted May 10, 2013 17:56 UTC (Fri) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093) [Link] (1 responses)

It's worth pointing out that older versions of packages are frequently just as buggy as the newer ones, just for a different set of bugs. One might hope that "stable" means "the package is perfect up to this level of feature", but it usually just means "the set of bugs and features won't change".

The kernel is perhaps the only exception to this rule, in that bugfixes are aggressively backported.

I'd like to see a rolling release for leaf packages (KDE, Firefox, LibreOffice) with perhaps a 1-week delay in testing for the "developers" of the distro, a 2-week delay for the technically-able users [those who report bugs], and a 4-week delay for the non-technical users. But simultaneously, big changes (eg Gnome2->3, or Sysvinit->Systemd) should not be deployed till they are ready.

A proposal for an always-releasable Debian

Posted May 10, 2013 18:14 UTC (Fri) by droundy (guest, #4559) [Link]

Having the bug fixed is a *huge* win for users. It means that I don't have to worry about, "If I apt-get upgrade, maybe something I rely on will stop working." By definition, bugs that are already there aren't stopping me from getting my work done.

I'll agree that it'd be nice to see more bugs fixed, but I'm much more keen on avoiding new bugs being introduced. e.g. it was really annoying when ubuntu unity stopped working with the trackpad on my wife's laptop. It still works in gnome, xfce, etc. But having to switch desktop environments in order to restore previous functionality is a royal pain. Instead she just carries a mouse around everywhere.

A proposal for an always-releasable Debian

Posted May 11, 2013 14:39 UTC (Sat) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link] (7 responses)

> A platform like lauchpad/ppa, which would allow one to smoothly add repositories with newer packages

Like http://backports.debian.org/ ?

A proposal for an always-releasable Debian

Posted May 12, 2013 1:48 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (6 responses)

close, the problem is that with backports you either enable ALL backports, or you load and update each package manually

With PPA, each package is it's own repository, so you enable the package you want and don't think about it again.

A proposal for an always-releasable Debian

Posted May 16, 2013 3:55 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link] (5 responses)

Not seeing the difference. Once you take a backport it will continue to update that package automatically. How is that different from the extra step of installing an entirely new repo that automatically updates.

A proposal for an always-releasable Debian

Posted May 16, 2013 5:52 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (4 responses)

It's very possible that I don't know the correct way to take a backport.

the information at http://backports.debian.org seems to say that the way to do this is to add backports to your sources.list file, which will pull in every package in backports (which is almost as bad as moving to testing)

The only other way I've installed a package from testing or backports was to go to packages.debian.org, search for the package, and then download and install the .deb manually, which doesn't get updated after that.

What do I not know?

A proposal for an always-releasable Debian

Posted May 16, 2013 7:02 UTC (Thu) by rhertzog (subscriber, #4671) [Link] (3 responses)

From http://backports.debian.org/Instructions/ :

----
All backports are deactivated by default (i.e. the packages are pinned to 100 by using ButAutomaticUpgrades: yes in the Release files. If you want to install something from backports run:

apt-get -t squeeze-backports install "package"
----

So you're wrong.

A proposal for an always-releasable Debian

Posted May 16, 2013 9:57 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

Thanks for the correction and additional info.

I didn't know that apt/deb even had the ability to have a repo with packages in it that are newer than what you have installed without auto-upgrading to them. the only place I had run across that was in source distros like Gentoo.

It's always good to learn new things.

A proposal for an always-releasable Debian

Posted May 19, 2013 21:04 UTC (Sun) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

note that this is also how openSUSE handles stuff since years. Go to software.opensuse.org/packages and the software you find will (with One-click-install) enable a repo. The average openSUSE user has like 10 repos or more with extra or newer software. Heck, one of these obs repos makes openSUSE a rolling-release distro: tumbleweed. Yep, all that because we got zypper and OBS which, frankly, kick the ass of any other distro's infrastructure.

A proposal for an always-releasable Debian

Posted May 19, 2013 21:35 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

umm. This is very much possible in a number of RPM based distros including Fedora, openSUSE etc.