Debian 9 (Stretch) Will Be Released Today

The Debian Project has been liveblogging today's release of Debian 9 (Stretch) using the Twitter hashtag #releasingstretch. Some of the announcements:

• The oldstable suite (wheezy) has now been renamed to oldoldstable
• Debian jessie now been renamed to oldstable!
• The Debian stretch suites have now been renamed to stable!
• The draft debian-devel-announce post is ready, archive docs are being cleaned up

This release is named after that purple octopus in Toy Story 3, and more tantalizing tidbits of information keep appearing on Debian's micronews site:

• At least 1436 people and 18 teams contributed to Debian in 2017
• Stretch has 25,357 source packages with 9,808,465 source files
• There were 13 different themes proposed to be the official Debian stretch theme
• Debian Stretch ships with the free mathematical software SageMath, you can install it with apt
• During the stretch development, 101 contributors became Debian Developers, and 94 more become Debian Maintainers
• Debian Stretch will ship with the first release of the Debian Astro Pure Blend [for astronomers]
• Debian Popularity Contest gathers anonymous statistics about Debian packages usage from about 195,000 reports

They got some catching up to do

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm already on Slackware 14.2

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

The cool guys stay with 13.37.

Re:

[ls671]

It is very rare that I reveal security sensitive details on /. but for the good of the cause: So am I (are we).

Re:

[slashdice]

We all know the most popular Linux distro is a 5 year old version of Android.

Re:Simple question

[uM0p ap!sdn]

Debian is the leader

Oh, so you think ubuntu is, hrhr

Like most people like you that have no clue, without debian, ubuntu wouldn't exist, ubuntu is based on debian.

It's astonishing how many people don't know that

Now, go play with your antiviri, malware, spybot, rootkit, updaters and reboot a few dozen times in between updates and in the mean time, I will get some work done on my debian sid system.

http://distrowatch.com/index.p... [distrowatch.com] 7 days or 6 months debian is #1

Windows people, can't live with them ..... We can live without them

Re:

[Stormwatch]

antiviri

What is an "against men"?

Re:

[smallfries]

Anti-viri, eh? Gosh that sounds almost as clever as "television" and other frankenstein words. Did you know that anti- is derived from Greek?

Re:

[Hognoxious]

So what? It exists in Latin. Would you consider something a "Frankenstein word" if part of it ultimately came from Indo-European or Etruscan?

Re:

[smallfries]

Somebody pretenious enough to use "virii" really should know better.

Re:

[Greyfox]

Ubuntu should be taken seriously, as they seem to be the most successful corporate takeover of Linux to date. Redhat seemed largely content to just follow along with community standards for components, but Ubuntu's been actively trying to dictate Linux standards since they started. And while I can see where they'r'e coming from with systemd and weyland, having spent the better part of the last couple years up to my ears in shitty X11 code, their tendency to dismiss actual legitimate concerns because "No one

Re:

[strikethree]

Now, go play with your antiviri, malware, spybot, rootkit, updaters and reboot a few dozen times in between updates and in the mean time, I will get some work done on my debian sid system.

Debian ate the poison pill. Will anyone die tomorrow? Not likely. Will anything bad happen next year? Not likely. Long term, perhaps 50 years, it is guaranteed that Debian will be dead or will be used to abuse the people who use it... rather like MS Windows right now.

Re: So Devuan's already obsolete?

[that this is not und]

I would rather install and use NetBSD. You don't even need to drop into a shell and run vi anymore to configure NetBSD after installing it.

Re:

[McGiraf]

Yep, confused people were , are and will be a major problem. Not just with Debian.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

All of the new users I've dealt with in the 24 years I've used Linux were more confused by the different distributions than any other single thing.

If they're confused by the idea that different people can release slightly tweaked versions of Linux, I submit that they will spend most of their lives confused in any case, and there is nothing that can be done to fix it.

Re:

[pnutjam]

Winner, winner, Chicken Dinner.
It's amazing how many people manage to go through life in a state of perpetual confusion.

Re:

[Rakarra]

All of the new users I've dealt with in the 24 years I've used Linux were more confused by the different distributions than any other single thing.

If they're confused by the idea that different people can release slightly tweaked versions of Linux, I submit that they will spend most of their lives confused in any case, and there is nothing that can be done to fix it.

About Linux? Yes. About other things? Not necessary.

Re:

[F.Ultra]

That's why I gave up on food. Too much variety to choose from.

Attack of the anons!

[Gravis Zero]

That makes two things that brings out the anon trolls in droves: Net neutrality and Systemd.

Re:

[Cito]

well to be absolutely fair, systemd is the worst thing ever and has ruined Linux's long lived Posix standard until Poettering, who created the abortion known as Pulse, actually manipulated his way into ruined it thanks to RedHat

Re:

[Gravis Zero]

I think maybe RedHat needed something to cement its position as lead supporter for Linux systems or maybe they needed more change for the sake of change. I don't know for sure but it sure doesn't seem like their changes are motivated by benevolence. I do agree though that Poettering seems like an instrument of their will.

Don't worry too much, though. If I've learned anything from open source, it's that long term survival is based on merit.

Re:

[somenickname]

Why call people trolls that point out the problems with systemd swallowing log messages and not providing proper exit statuses?

Because this is a post about a new release of Debian stable and not a post about systemd. This is Slashdot and flooding a post with systemd hate is just beating a dead horse at this point. Most Slashdot users agree: Systemd sucks. But, there is no need to shit on every Linux post with systemd hate. We get it.

Yes, the idea of systemd is great

Actually, I take that back. You *don't* get it.

Re:

[rmdingler]

Debian stable

and deceased equine.

I see what you did there.

Re:

[F.Ultra]

Because it's a proven lie? systemd does not swallow log messages, it presents and stores far more logs than sysv did. And the complaint about exit codes are due to either pure lies or people trying to use "systemctl start " as a drop in replacement for "/etc/init.d/ start" which it's not.

Re:

[F.Ultra]

There's a difference between a drop-in replacement and a replacement. All the new init systems like systemd, upstart and smf are event driven, and are so for a good reason. The old sysv system was completely hit and miss when it came to exit codes so all those posts complaining that they puppet scripts no longer work had problems on sysv as well. And if you think about it any daemon can die at any time after launch so you must have some other way of checking the status of them anyway (if systemctl return wi

Congratulations

[somenickname]

New releases of Debian stable *should* make the front page of Slashdot. It's a proper Big Deal. You can make a huge list of things that Debian stable is not: Not the most used distro, not the most user friendly distro, not the most up to date distro, not the most "libre" distro, etc... But, if you want to find a distro that meets one of those criteria, it's probably based on Debian. When they release a new stable version, the entire open source community benefits.

Here's to decades more of Debian stable!

Re:

[drinkypoo]

New releases of Debian were a lot more exciting before systemd. Now I only care about new releases of Devuan.

Re:

[Dolda2000]

Systemd is just the default on Debian, and is trivial to replace by whatever you like. I do agree that Debian would be a better distribution if systemd weren't the default, but nevertheless, all you need to do is apt-get install sysvinit-core.

Re:

[influenza]

I agree, Debian stable releases are very high quality. I've been using stretch on a few systems (desktop and non-production server) for a couple of months and there are major improvements all over the place. Excellent work Debian!

Re:

[antdude]

Yep, I use stable and oldstable (wait a few months before doing the big upgrades) on my desktop/workstation machines. My Linux friends say I am crazy for doing that and should use testing (to them, it is stable enough). I just don't want to deal things breaking!

Debian's downloads still show Jessie!

[antdude]

Are they late?

flamewars of yesteryear

[doom]

Nary a peep about this:

Firefox and Thunderbird return to Debian with the release of "Stretch", and replace their debranded versions Iceweasel and Icedove, which were present in the archive for more than 10 years.

Ah, where are the flame wars of yesteryear?

I guess Mozilla has moved on to new frontiers in alienating the open source community.

Whoa

[l20502]

I just recently upgraded to Jessie

Tried it again

[ebvwfbw]

It's better. Still a quarky setup.. like asking about where to put grub when it knows damn well where. As if it even gives us a choice. Side from the installation that IMHO is overdue to be updated, it seems to be a bit better. I see no reason to switch to it from Fedora 25 with KDE, however. Probably just my preference.

Re:

[F.Ultra]

So go use Devuan? Or is the anti systemd crowd now joining the SWJ, Vegan, Crossfitter crowds where they cannot stand silent for 5 minutes before announcing their special needs and wants to the world?

Re:

[epyT-R]

Critiquing technology != SJW crybullying

Re:

[F.Ultra]

I see no critiquing, almost every single anti systemd post on Slashdot for the last years have been crybullying. And the GP in particular was crybullying, nothing more.

Re:

[serviscope_minor]

the last years have been crybullying

If that's above your threshold for bullying then oh boy are you a sensitive little snowflake.

Re:

[F.Ultra]

Read all the posts from AC:s regarding systemd to this article and tell me how you can come to a different conclusion. There are tons of "Poettering don't know about exit codes", "systemd eats logs" and so forth. None of them are true and all of them are crybullying.

Re:

[0100010001010011]

almost every single anti systemd post on Slashdot for the last years have been crybullying.

tmpfiles: R! /dir/.* destroys root

poettering commented on Mar 30: I am not sure I'd consider this much of a problem. Yeah, it's a UNIX pitfall, but "rm -rf /foo/.*" will work the exact same way, no?

Again:

Bug Security IT Linux
Running "rm -rf /" Is Now Bricking Linux Systems (phoronix.com) 699
Posted by timothy on Monday February 01, 2016 @08:56AM from the now-you-can-troll-harder dept.

An anonymous reader writes:

For newer systems utilizing UEFI, running rm -rf / is enough to permanently brick your system. While it's a trivial command to run on Linux systems, Windows and other operating systems are also prone to this issue when using UEFI. The problem comes down to UEFI variables being mounted with read/write permissions and when recursively deleting everything, the UEFI variables get wiped too. Systemd developers have rejected mounting the EFI variables as read-only, since there are valid use-cases for writing to them. Mounting them read-only can also break other applications, so for now there is no good solution to avoid potentially bricking your system, but kernel developers are investigating the issue.

Re:

[F.Ultra]

Just ignore the fact that it was fixed on Mar 27, 3 days before that Poettering quote. Yes he was wrong, I never said that he was infallible. That people still bring this issue up as "systemd is bad" is part of the crybullying yes, or are we now pretending that "rm" is completely fucked up because it once had the same bug (Poetterings fault was of course that he believed that rm still had that particular bug)? I don't think so.

Re:

[rdelsambuco]

Complaining shaming is sad.

Re:

[myowntrueself]

Complaining shaming is sad.

Complaining is hate speech.

Re:

[myowntrueself]

Complaining shaming is sad.

Complaining is hate speech.

Labeling something hate speech without first enumerating your privileges is violence.

Any communication might cause offense. Therefore all forms of communication must be banned.

Re:

[myowntrueself]

You people are retarded.

Thats hate speech on two levels! Hate speech against me and hate speech against differently abled people!

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

So go use Devuan?

I will, the next time I upgrade. (Still using Xubuntu 14.04.)

The other oddity here: I'm a professional astronomer, and I don't see any reason to try Debian Astro Pure Blend. Any astronomy-related software is either packaged for Debian (in which case I've already installed it through apt), or not packaged for Debian (in which case it won't be in Debian Astro either). What's the point of a "Pure Blend" distribution when all you need is a list of package names to feed to apt-get?

Re:

[F.Ultra]

I think that it's for users who don't know all those packages to feed to apt and who want to simply install a single meta-package, say "Virtual Observatory" and thus get all the packages included there installed automatically. As I understand it these pure blends is not special versions of Debian either but more working groups that create and maintain these meta-packages that you can install from a vanilla Debian 9.

Re:

[mvdwege]

the technical reasons smart people are against systemd

And what would those be?

Re:

[serviscope_minor]

And what would those be?

Very hard to debug problems, for one. For example, on this here very laptop, after I unplug it from the power it cleanly shuts itself down after a period of maybe 20 to 30 minutes. It's not running the upower daemon, and everything related to battery level is set to 0.

There's nothing in the log indicating why it's shutting down or where the shutdown command is coming from. So far, no one has ever suggested a new place to look or a new avenue to try---well excepting one guy who said

Re:

[Bengie]

SystemD was designed assuming the happy path. Kind of like what you get from a freshman CS student. When crap hits the fan, the failure modes are largely undefined. There's also the difficult to port aspect, which is a bad thing for these kinds of projects that typically lend themselves well to porting. And some repetition and inconsistencies. SystemD is the PHP init systems. I know it's not just init, but that's what it's known for. At one point there was an open bug that got closed as "working as intended

Re:

[mvdwege]

I see lots of unfounded assertions. I am not impressed.

Re:

[Bengie]

Subjective opinions aside, the fact that the lead dev gave someone a tongue lashing over expecting his logs to be at-least partially usable after a system crash so he could figure out why it crashed, is absurd. His recommendation was to expect no logs to be viable and just throw them out. This was after it was already in CentOS stable as the default.

I have never seen a system that corrupted all of the log data from an unexpected shutdown, only possibly the last little bit or the FS taking a crap, but that

Re:

[mvdwege]

I have never seen a system that corrupted all of the log data from an unexpected shutdown

I have. Since we now have competing anecdotes, how about some actual arguments for a change?

Oh no, all you do is parrot talking points. Here's a cracker, Polly.

Re:

[Bengie]

Better a parrot than an astroturfing apologetic shill that doesn't understand the difference between the filesystem corrupting log data or the logger corrupting log data.Then again, "Arguing on the internet is like running at the special olympics...". Sometimes giving up is the correct response.

Re:

[Eunuchswear]

the fact that the lead dev gave someone a tongue lashing over expecting his logs to be at-least partially usable after a system crash

Amusing anecdote. Pity it's not true.

Re:

[mvdwege]

In other words, parotted bullshit, no reasons.

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

In other words, parotted bullshit, no reasons.

Yeah, that's mostly what I see. I get that some people don't want a C application running their init system and would rather have shell scripts. That's fine.

I run a couple dozen unique instances with systemd and I don't see the problems that they keep saying are inherent. I can't claim that nobody hits them, but I don't and I enjoy fast/parallel boot times. It's especially useful with complex storage stacks and virtualization when there are multiple levels o

Re:

[0100010001010011]

tmpfiles: R! /dir/.* destroys root #5644

poettering commented on Mar 30: I am not sure I'd consider this much of a problem. Yeah, it's a UNIX pitfall, but "rm -rf /foo/.*" will work the exact same way, no?

Re:

[mvdwege]

I don't see you refuting Lennart's argument, actually. He is right: Unix gives you the rope to hang yourself with, and a faulty directive in a systemd unit is as bad as a typo in a shell command (or a SysV startup script).

Re:

[0100010001010011]

He is right:

Try it. He's not. That has never worked that way. Unix is smart enough to cut the rope for you if you try to hang yourself with that.

root@m6700:/tmp# ls -lah
total 8.0K
drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 4.0K Jun 18 22:12 .
drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 4.0K Jun 18 22:12 ..
root@m6700:/tmp# touch .Hello
root@m6700:/tmp# mkdir .World
root@m6700:/tmp# rm -rf /tmp/.*
rm: refusing to remove '.' or '..' directory: skipping '/tmp/.'
rm: refusing to remove '.' or '..' directory: skipping '/tmp/..'
root@m6700:/tmp# ls -lah
total 8.0K
drwxrwxr

Re:

[mvdwege]

Sigh. Whining about a technicality in an example may make you feel like you're smart, to the rest of the world you're just a dick.

Re:

[Eunuchswear]

That has never worked that way.

What, never? Never worked that way? Are you sure?

Re:

[0100010001010011]

So your argument went from: "He's Right" to "You're a dick for pointing out he's not right".

Because he was NOT right. Not only was he not right he was completely wrong. I discovered that 'feature' way back when I was learning UNIX on OS X 10.0.

How does the person that wrote the next gen init glob not know that?

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[pnutjam]

I have no problem with SystemD and use it at home and on some production systems.
However, there are a huge number of Red Hat using companies who are sticking with RH 6 because of systemd. Most of them will eventually go to RH 7 and systemd, but until 2020, RH will continue to support their pre-systemd Enterprise release.

Re:

[Rakarra]

Done. Most of us have no issue with it in a production environment. Try again.

Re: And one other thing...

[Ziest]

You can solve your systemd infection here

ftp://linuxmafia.com/kb/Debian... [linuxmafia.com]

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Without logs, simple problems can easily turn into major problems. We use Puppet to manage servers and leave SELinux enabled. With Red Hat 6, that wasn't a huge problem since you could almost always see errors on the console or in syslog. With systemd, very often there's no error shown or logged, and you have to know to check /var/log/audit/audit.log. Just checked my main dev machine, and that log file is over 300 MB long, so good luck finding and understanding what you need.

An even bigger problem is th

Re:

[F.Ultra]

Please provide the contents of "/usr/lib/systemd/system/mongod.service" either by cat "/usr/lib/systemd/system/mongod.service" or "systemctl cat mongod.service".

Re: And one other thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lennart is too young to grok UNIX. He just doesn't get why exit statuses are important.

Re:

[F.Ultra]

"systemctl start" schedules the service to start, it does not start it there and then. You might still not like it but systemd is an event driven system and not a "execute this particular bash shell" type of system, so one cannot use systemctl as a straight drop in replacement for how sysv worked, it works differently.

Note that you had this kind of behaviour in some sysv scripts as well so it was more of a hit and miss in sysv. I.e daemons that could take a very long time to start like say MySQL had init sc

Re:

[F.Ultra]

Because no one wants to have that long command names on Unix? All the new init systems like systemd, upstart and smf are event driven. With sysv as I said you only have hit and miss and people using the exit code from the sysv scripts have just been lucky that it's worked somewhat for them combined with the fact that some of the old sysv scripts contained pre flight checks that the people who ported them to systemd unit files forgot to add.

Re:

[akozakie]

So, you're a paying customer of the strongest commercial backer of systemd? Did you let them know about this? Did you complain about losses and asked for explanation on plans to correct the problems, in order to decide on your way forward, including whether or not to stay on their solution?

Because that is the only meaningful way of influencing their decisions. If customers are angry, then s..t like this either gets fixed or rolled back (note - you don't get to choose the option, they do; you should only car

Re:

[mvdwege]

Because the service doesn't? Really, nothing is a defense against shoddy software, so neither is systemd./p

Re:And one other thing...

[Hognoxious]

Because some of us prefer 1,200 lines that work with 17 that don't?

Re:

[ras]

Because some of us prefer 1,200 lines that work with 17 that don't?

If indeed it was just 17 lines of code that didn't work they might have a point. It's not so hard to fix 17 lines of code. In fact the reason we like 1200 lines of code is because we can fix it.

The reason we don't like those 17 lines of code is they are really 1,139,536 lines of code hiding behind 17 lines of configuration. Worse it's not just 1 million lines of simple C, but multiple processes communicating through a horrid RPC system th

Re:

[CronoCloud]

It can and does, it just depends on how the distro has set it up.

Re:

[F.Ultra]

I guess that the sysv script run pre start tests like checking that lock file and where the ones producting the logs while the systemd unit file for mongodb is just starting mongodb straight up and thus is not getting these particular logs because mongodb does not log about them. Either mongodb should be changed to start logging these things or the systemd unit file should be changed to include those pre start tests that the old sysv script had.

So the problem is not with systemd itself but with the sysv to

Re:

[Eunuchswear]

The bigger problem is that messages that used to show on the console with SysV init scripts are now no longer showed on the console, and they are not logged in the journal. That makes troubleshooting a pain in the neck. Simple problems, like a /var/lib/mongodb/mongod.lock hanging around after a power problem which prevents MongoDB from restarting, can take a while to trackdown since nothing logs that error

Repost of trolling from over a year ago.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

My /etc/apt/sources.list points not to stable, but to jessie. I assume most other stable users have their config set the same to avoid exactly the issue you mentioned. 'apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade' will not upgrade me to Stretch until I reconfigure my /etc/apt/sources.list.

So basically, you just need to have your config set up properly, and Debian will do what you say.

systemd not

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use a debian derivative without systemd, for example, my favorite...

MX Linux, based on Debian stable

See this
https://mxlinux.org/
and the great forum here
https://forum.mxlinux.org/search.php?search_id=active_topics

A great community, low snark, up to date community repository with the latest and goodies.
Useful MX tools for common tasks.

NO systemd, it uses the older init

Re: systemd not

[rknop]

Devuan is a fork of Debian that eschews systemd. It works well for me; indeed, I've been using Devuan testing, and my network of nfs-using machines have been more stable and less trouble than they were under Ubuntu. I recommend it. The more people who use systemd-free distros, the less likely systemd is to take over everything.

Re:

[WallyL]

I tried Devuan on a vm and it was flaky on the xfce firefox youtube playback. I decided to give it a whirl on an 11-year-old Dell Latitude D630 and everything was amazingly smooth! I have not actually tried debian on it yet, and don't care to, but it is way smoother interface than the Korora 25 Cinnamon install I had on it before.

This dinky little D630 that is your grandpa's laptop is making a devuan believer out of me...

Re:

[Ziest]

Here is the solution to the systemd infection.

ftp://linuxmafia.com/kb/Debian... [linuxmafia.com]