Debian 12 "bookworm" released [LWN.net]

"After 1 year, 9 months, and 28 days of development", Debian 12, codenamed "bookworm", has been released. The announcement has lots of details about package versions for desktop environments (6 are supported), kernel version (Linux 6.1 series), other package versions (compilers, graphics tools, office suites, languages, and more), architectures supported (8 for real hardware and 5 for cloud services), blends, and lots more.

This release contains over 11,089 new packages for a total count of 64,419 packages, while over 6,296 packages have been removed as "obsolete". 43,254 packages were updated in this release. The overall disk usage for "bookworm" is 365,016,420 kB (365 GB), and is made up of 1,341,564,204 lines of code.
"bookworm" has more translated man pages than ever thanks to our translators who have made man-pages available in multiple languages such as: Czech, Danish, Greek, Finnish, Indonesian, Macedonian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Serbian, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. All of the systemd man pages are now completely available in German.

See the Debian 12 release notes for additional information.

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Debian 12 "bookworm" released

Posted Jun 10, 2023 16:39 UTC (Sat) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (1 responses)

At the time of writing - 10th June 2023 at 1638 UTC - the release process is still going on. Media images are still being tested and the final release of these has not yet been signed. There may still be loose ends in documentation and web sites - but yes, it's pretty much done. Thanks to all the users, developers and others who have contributed over the last year and nine months to get us this far.

[Andy Cater - working with the folk testing and releasing install media]

Debian 12 "bookworm" released

Posted Jun 10, 2023 17:06 UTC (Sat) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Just upgraded a Debian 11 system to 12. Upgrade process was absolutely smooth; no issues whatsoever. 🎉

Big thanks to all the Debian developers.

Debian 12 "bookworm" released

Posted Jun 10, 2023 17:00 UTC (Sat) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link]

Woop woop!

Debian 12 "bookworm" released

Posted Jun 10, 2023 23:56 UTC (Sat) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link] (4 responses)

1.34B LoC

These computer thingies are getting quite complicated nowadays. I wonder if there are any mistakes in there.

Debian 12 "bookworm" released

Posted Jun 11, 2023 6:13 UTC (Sun) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (3 responses)

There's an urban myth about something called bugs, but I've never encountered one in real life... 🤪

PS. Just imagine how many of those lines are duplicated functionality in different or even same programming languages. If someone could merge all that by some magic, the number would probably go down ten fold.

Debian 12 "bookworm" released

Posted Jun 11, 2023 14:07 UTC (Sun) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

There are definitely a ton of code/data copies in Debian, as well as intentional cases like multiple versions of toolchains for example.

https://wiki.debian.org/EmbeddedCopies

Debian 12 "bookworm" released

Posted Jun 11, 2023 20:08 UTC (Sun) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]

Sadly the trend these days is in the other direction, what with things like flatpack, etc.

Debian 12 "bookworm" released

Posted Jun 14, 2023 10:45 UTC (Wed) by eduperez (guest, #11232) [Link]

There is a theorem that states that every piece of software has at least one bug, and also one redundant line of code; thus, in conclusion, every piece of software can be reduced to a single buggy line of code.

Debian 12 "bookworm" released

Posted Jun 11, 2023 19:55 UTC (Sun) by bgpepi (guest, #77064) [Link] (12 responses)

The delusions of debian...
https://unixsheikh.com/articles/the-delusions-of-debian.html

Debian 12 "bookworm" released

Posted Jun 11, 2023 20:12 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

So tl;dr: The author claims Debian maintainers/pagkagers are incapable of backporting security patches for versions of software that upstreams have ceased to support.

...And it's indirectly systemd+gnome's fault, because if not for that then more folks would be participating in Debian development.

Debian 12 "bookworm" released

Posted Jun 12, 2023 10:04 UTC (Mon) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]

Yeah, I guess all those "Devuan" developers would totally have made the difference, eh?

Intellectual dishonesty

Posted Jun 11, 2023 20:47 UTC (Sun) by geofft (subscriber, #59789) [Link] (3 responses)

Is there any reason to believe that this is a new problem / a decline?

For example, the author complains about PHP versions in Debian 11. But let's take a look at Debian 3, released on 2002-07-19, which shipped PHP versions 3 and 4.1. Both of these versions had hit upstream EOL before Debian release - PHP 3 was released in June 1998 and had already hit upstream EOL almost two years earlier on 2000-10-20, and PHP 4.1 had hit upstream EOL on 2002-03-12. Did the Debian developers of the 2000s - well before all the things the author of this article dislikes like systemd and Black Lives Matter stickers - actually provide quality security support for PHP 3 and 4.1 until 2006-06-30? Did they backport every single security fix? Did they audit these EOL versions for problems the upstream maintainers were no longer looking for?

It's very easy to take a problem that's been around for 30-40 years and say "Look at this problem that exists today" and insinuate it's related to some recent politics.

Intellectual dishonesty

Posted Jun 12, 2023 1:29 UTC (Mon) by dilinger (subscriber, #2867) [Link]

"This means that unless Debian has some really good C developers, no one can provide any security fixes for PHP 7.4."

Debian, famously without any 'really good C developers.' 🙄

Also, as a former maintainer for the php4 package in Debian, I found it incredibly amusing that they used PHP as an example of anything security-related. I stopped maintaining it (and using it) because I couldn't get upstream to fix a security issue that I'd already fixed in Debian.

Intellectual dishonesty

Posted Jun 12, 2023 4:25 UTC (Mon) by ondrej (subscriber, #27872) [Link] (1 responses)

The article is just anti-“woke” rant. Same nonsense as you regular “the good old days” piece.

The PHP security updates are done by following the upstream releases, and the patches after upstream EOL are provided by a collaborative effort between Fedora (Remi Collet) and Debian maintainer.

And actually, the PHP in Debian is maintained by a good C developer :-P.

Intellectual dishonesty

Posted Jun 15, 2023 15:06 UTC (Thu) by tpo (subscriber, #25713) [Link]

Many, many thanks for maintaining PHP Ondrej!

Debian 12 "bookworm" released

Posted Jun 11, 2023 21:28 UTC (Sun) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (2 responses)

>PHP 8.0 was 10 months old yet Debian's 11 was released with PHP 7.4

It happens frequently that Debian packages are *not* affected by security vulnerabilities, *because* they don't jump on the latest and greatest. (I remember this happening for exim and openssl recently).

Do you have any example of a security bug that matters which Debian did not fix?

Debian 12 "bookworm" released

Posted Jun 15, 2023 15:10 UTC (Thu) by tpo (subscriber, #25713) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, Chromium in Debian was during a few years (?) undermaintained and wasn't following upstream's security fixes/releases ... which is quite bad, because the browser is your interface to the big bad internets...

I *believe* this has changed now and Chromium is quite up to the latest security patches now... (check yourself if you *need* to know)

Debian 12 "bookworm" released

Posted Jun 15, 2023 20:55 UTC (Thu) by dilinger (subscriber, #2867) [Link]

The lapse in Chromium security updates happened between May 2021 (the last upload by the former long-term maintainer) and Jan 2022.

Debian 12 "bookworm" released

Posted Jun 11, 2023 22:13 UTC (Sun) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link] (1 responses)

FTR, I stopped reading that page when I read the sentence "As of writing Debian Bullseye has 96.754 packages and 168.670 packages in unstable" which doesn't make sense for a number of reasons.

For those of you who are tempted to read further, be warned that this may take more time than it will grant insight.

Debian 12 "bookworm" released

Posted Jun 12, 2023 4:27 UTC (Mon) by ondrej (subscriber, #27872) [Link]

I stopped reading when I saw “Devuan”…

Debian 12 "bookworm" released

Posted Jun 17, 2023 22:37 UTC (Sat) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

I have seldomly read a post about Debian that is as dishonest.

Debian has its problems, but they are surely elsewhere.

Just for interest - do you really believe in that drivel?

I am switching back to Debian

Posted Jun 12, 2023 12:11 UTC (Mon) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link]

I am bored of ubuntu (which was a good distro some years ago), but snap are too ugly and bogus, skype regularly freeze my laptop...

So I am going back to a plain rock solid Debian, and will try to contribute my 2 cents too.

Thank you guys

Debian 12 "bookworm" released

Posted Jun 12, 2023 12:30 UTC (Mon) by fredrik (subscriber, #232) [Link]

This is so nice! I know a new release is coming like clockwork every other year. Still, I'm equally impressed each time it happens.

Coordinating so many packages and dependencies and making a coherent distribution which can be maintained at least in part for up to 5 years after each release. And a distribution that in my experience is, and has been, rock solid, at least for the two decades now that I've been using Debian, both at work and at home.

And all this mostly on a volunteer basis with many hundreds of developers.

Thank you, all who are involved! You are awesome! ❤️