Today is Debian 8 release day (opens in new tab)

Took a quick look at some of the bugs that would affect me... It's systemd, systemd and systemd.

Oh, yeah, that's Debian's systemd release.

Don't forget that the "Stable" definition for Debian is not the normal one, they are super zelous. Testing and Sid distributions are "stable" for the rest of distros. And remember that all those bugs on the Debian release are present in other distros, and they even don't acknowledge them sometimes.

I also wonder the reason for that.

As a speculation from an outsider, I'll list these reasons: Release team was very motivated in this cycle (auto removal of packages, not letting any new package in freeze, very strict exceptions even for packages that fix bugs etc.), most of current rc bugs are lurking there for months without any progress (and since Debian is all volunteer work, they can't force anybody to fix 'em), and they couldn't also remove those packages because they've already removed packages they could remove. Another thing is some of those RC bugs are security issues, which are handled by Security Team for stable and oldstable, so there is no reason for security issues to delay the release. When all these are considered, they may have not deemed further delaying the release worthwhile.

I would also like to hear the real reasons from a team member, though.

Thats interesting. One thing that is said about Debian is "most stable GNU/Linux". Now it seems, it is a thing of the past.

https://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/

Any idea why they have gone with this?

I hope stable release team accepts fixes to some of those issues into later updates.

Debian is really well-made, we've used it at my college to host a yearly programming competition since 2012, it's stable, quick, and rather simple to maintain, especially if you're not doing anything too complex, other than hosting a couple of PHP files on top of a web server, that's the full scope of what we've done. I am not a security expert so that I couldn't answer on, we've not yet had any breaches yet, despite all the major things that came out last year or so, 'Heartbleed', and 'Shell Shock'. I think the best option for you is to try it out on one machine maybe via LiveCD and see how you like or don't like it.

> All I care about is that stuff just works for as many years as possible, gets security updates and does not break

I would go with FreeBSD or Debian.

Debian 8 has support until 2017. Ubuntu 1404 LTS has support until 2019. RHEL 7 has support until 2024 (and Centos).

What are your servers running now? Is there an upgrade path from whatever Linux it is? Do you have a lot of custom configurations?

Debian is widely regarded and typically provides two to three years update support for a given code name (e.g. Wheezy or Jessie). There is a proposal for providing Long Term Support (LTS) for Wheezy as has been done for Squeeze.

Debian 8 brings with it a new "userspace", systemd.

As such, upgrades may be painful if you have anything esoteric in your configurations.

How about a mail[0] on the mirror announce mailing list from half an hour ago?

“As you are probably already aware of, Debian 8.0 "jessie", is just a few hours away from becoming the next stable release. This is a heads up in case you were not aware of, as there is probably going to be a higher load on the mirrors.”

[0] https://lists.debian.org/debian-mirrors-announce/2015/04/msg...

Debian Twitter page has also got live coverage https://twitter.com/debian

Mailing? It links to a mailing. But the page is release.debian.org - do you have any more authoritative source for a different release date?

Also on identi.ca they wrote today:

"FTP/Release teams' work is complete; once CD testing is complete, the mirrors will be updated and jessie will be released!"

https://identi.ca/debian

What about this:

https://www.debian.org/News/2015/20150426

> My only gripe with Ubuntu is that apt-get doesn't have the latest stables packages (like Amazon Linux does). I'm guessing it would be the same with Debian.

Depends on your definition of "stable". Since distros vary widely on what they consider to be "stable", comparing various distros' stable releases is like comparing processors by raw GHz values or dSLRs by megapixels alone.

Debian Stable is the last place to go if you want very recent builds of packages, but the first place to go if you want absolute, rock-solid stability.

Debian Sid (unstable) has the latest versions of each of the packages, though Debian's guidelines are strict enough that testing and sid are oftentimes more stable than the "stable" releases of other distros.

My advice (and this is what I do): Run Debian stable (Jessie, as of today) as a base image, and use an appropriate container for applications that require more up-to-date applications. Best of both worlds.

The definition of "stable" for Debian means that the version number of every piece of software is frozen. Only security fixes (through security uploads) and critical fixes (through point releases) can get into the distribution if they are backported to work with the version currently in Debian. You don't get the latest software but you are ensured that an upgrade won't break anything.

Since the freeze is around 6 months, this means you get 6 months old software when Debian is released. There are some exceptions, like browsers that are too difficult to maintain at the same version.

We believe most people like this definition. This can be frustrating when you need the latest version of nginx but you are happy that upgrading some basic stuff won't break anything on your system: no deprecated configuration option in X, no command-line flag that doesn't exist anymore in Y. All should work exactly as before, with fewer security holes and bugs at each upgrade.

However, if you really want to have the latest version of a selected set of software, have a look at the official Debian backports. This is a great strength of Debian over Ubuntu (where backports are almost inexistant with the notable exception of the kernels): there are many backported packages. For example, if you need a more recent version of nginx and you are running Debian Wheezy, you'll get nginx 1.2.1. If you need something more recent (because you want to get SPDY), you can get nginx 1.6.2 through backports. See here: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nginx.

Backports are packaged from the versions that will be in the next Debian release. So, they should keep the same quality than the packages which are currently in Debian. This is a great strength over random PPA. Some of them are maintained by skillful people, some others are not. If you trust Debian for its packages, the backports are made by Debian Developers too.

For nginx, there is no 1.8 because backports are taken from the next release. As this next release is currently frozen, the version proposed in backports is still 1.6.2.

Using a Debian Stable with backports should allow you to get what you want: stability for most packages but latest releases (and latest bugs/changes) for a selection of packages.

It probably depends what packages you're specifically looking for newer versions of. For "common" web server setups (i.e. LAMP or similar), using Debian stable plus the Percona and Dotdeb repos will give you a rock solid OS with more recent versions of things like PHP, Redis, and MySQL/Percona Server.

If you can identify the specific packages (i.e. php? nodejs? mysql? redis? etc) that you found outdated in Ubuntu it will be much easier to make a suggestion about how appropriate Debian stable will be for you.

Debian does tend to run behind and prefer more stable and "mature" releases so I doubt you'll find what you're looking for with 8.

I wonder why, following their new "openness" motto, Microsoft is still not:

1) porting Visual Studio to Linux.

2) porting Office to Linux, or

3) contributing to Wine, with the goal of solving long-standing issues with their (above) software - but hey they could contribute in other areas too, since Wine is far from complete (a USB driver/stack is much needed IMHO).

I won't believe in Microsoft "openness" until I see one of the three above.

Edit: the fact they're using this event mainly to promote Azure services rather than talking about differences/upgrading issues from debian 7 to 8 speaks of itself.

I'd wait a month or two for edge cases to be worked out and then go for it.

If you have a fairly vanilla 7.8 system (i.e. no source compiled stuff on there, mainly just big name packages etc.) then you should be fine doing it now or in a few days.

We updated some simple 7.8 installs to the rc jessie release a month or so ago and everything went fine apart from an obscure bug with monit and inherited umasks. Got around that by manually installing the sid deb of monit.

Edit: the main thing you'll want to do is go read up on systemd ahead of upgrading as it's quite a change and there are still some wrinkles ('systemctl daemon-reload' is a new command we've had to use quite a bit).

Well, if you only have one 7.8 lying around, then fire up a VM, replicate your setup (best is to stop the machine tar-gz the whole, unpack it in the VM, boot from a rescue disc, isntall grub[2]; but if you don't want to go that bullett proof, then just copy sources.list [+ .d], install the same packages, copy /etc, reboot a few times) and try the upgrade.

We've a lot of 7.x instances (bare metal and VMs both) and a few running jessie for about 2 months. The upgrade was flawless. systemd had quirks, but that faded too.

All in all, go ahead, it's yet again a nice little step forward.

Debian upgrades are pretty reliable (IMHO best among linux distros) but I can't guarantee you won't have problems in your particular setup :)

I'd wait a couple of days. Dist-upgrade is normally reliable, but does not have a completely flawless history.

Depends what you're using it for. If you're putting Debian on a server, go with netinst, deselect everything in tasksel during the install and then apt-get only what you need post installation.

That way you start with a very lean < ~700MB base install with no unnecessary garbage on your system to worry about.

DVD makes sense if you have a dvd player (!) and not a good internet connection. Netinstall are pretty reliable now.

If you're not sure you can get the wifi card working in installer, then get DVD. Otherwise (you can get the wifi card recognized, or installing via ethernet etc.) there is no reason.

It's unfortunate that you didn't get an answer from your posts in the mailing list but the package has been dropped because of those "grave/serious" bugs:

* https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=771484 * https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=756729

The main problem seems to be there is not enough manpower to keep those policies up-to-date. Once there are "grave/serious" bugs, a non-essential package is usually dropped from testing (hence from the next stable). If people care enough, this is usually a hint to fix those bugs.

If you want to help, you can help fixing thos bugs: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=refpolicy

Once the bugs are fixed, the package can be backported to Jessie.

Found out today when trying to setup HA that Pacemaker is also missing from Jessie because they didn't have time to fix a bug...

Do you mean that only TLS is supported now?

All the release names are characters from the Toy Story franchise.

Install. Restore sysvinit. Reboot. Problem solved.

The Raspberry Pi 2 no longer needs a special port, and should work with stock Debian out of the box, ending the whole arm6k fiasco...

For posterity, jessie now has an official release announcement email:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/2015/msg00001.html

Also note that the link to the 7.8 point release above is wrong, the correct link is:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/2015/msg00000.html