Debian stable updates released

[Posted June 8, 2016 by ris]

Debian 7.11 is the eleventh (and final) update of its oldstable distribution Debian 7 "wheezy". The Debian Long Term Support Team will continue to support Wheezy until May 31, 2018.

Debian 8.5 is the fifth update of its stable distribution Debian 8 "jessie". "This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available."

to post comments

Serious problems?

Posted Jun 9, 2016 6:10 UTC (Thu) by rakoenig (subscriber, #29855) [Link] (7 responses)

How is "serious" defined in a Debian context? After upgrading from Wheezy to Jessie the Bluetooth stack broke and since then a user is no longer able to send data from his mobile device to a PC using bluetooth. Googling around that issue shows that probably the introduction of systemd has broken something on the dbus, but looking at this issue from a users perspective its quite annoying that now we have the 5th update to Jessie and this problem is still remaining. Obviously there are too many dependencies between the packages so nobody really feels responsible for fixing this.

Serious problems?

Posted Jun 9, 2016 8:46 UTC (Thu) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link] (2 responses)

Wheezy to Jessie marks the transition between bluez 4 and 5 (a non-backwards compatible upgrade). Many things went wrong there, most of all not Debian related.

Serious problems?

Posted Jun 9, 2016 9:55 UTC (Thu) by rakoenig (subscriber, #29855) [Link] (1 responses)

Not Debian related? Then who decided to introduce an incompatible update without considering that the other parts may need to be fixed as well?

Sorry from a users perspective the system is broken and its of no help to know that we can blame it on the new version of bluez.

Serious problems?

Posted Jun 9, 2016 11:00 UTC (Thu) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

One upstream switches to incompatible bluez 5 series, one upstream stays with bluez 4 series (whether because upstream upstream is dead, doesn't have the manpower or objects to the new version).
If both version can't be used at the same time, yes someone has to make the choice, and I sure don't envy the "one" who does.
Note that the switch to bluez 5 took a _long_ time precisely because reverse dependencies took a long time. i think Gnome was one of the first and it being the default desktop on Debian, it probably legitimately took a big weight in the mentioned choice (disclaimer: I do not use gnome).

Serious problems?

Posted Jun 9, 2016 9:44 UTC (Thu) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (3 responses)

"Googling around that issue shows that probably the introduction of systemd has broken something on the dbus"

This I need to hear so by what magic incarnation is systemd supposed to have managed that?

For those that live in the real world not fictionland it was the transition from 4.x to 5.x ( Bluez 5.x introduced backwards incompatible changes with 4.x stack ) that broke alot of stuff

1. http://www.bluez.org/release-of-bluez-5-0/
2. http://www.bluez.org/bluez-5-api-introduction-and-porting...

Serious problems?

Posted Jun 9, 2016 10:00 UTC (Thu) by rakoenig (subscriber, #29855) [Link] (2 responses)

Good that some people live in the "real world". Lots of people live in something that is called "userland" and they want things that work remaining to work, even after a distribution upgrade.

Yes, blame it on Bluez. Well done. And what does the user has to do to fix this mess? Wait another 2 years for the next major update and hoping that the things will get better?

Serious problems?

Posted Jun 9, 2016 10:18 UTC (Thu) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]

> And what does the user has to do to fix this mess?
Report bugs to her distribution? If they do not care, and the problem is important enough, switch distribution.

For advanced users: report the bug to the upstream project.

The LWN forums are only adequate for for reporting bugs in LWN, but even then lwn@lwn.net is probably preferred.

> Wait another 2 years [...]
Yes, the lazy solution will sometimes work for problems that are sufficiently widespread.

Serious problems?

Posted Jun 9, 2016 10:39 UTC (Thu) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

Yes those changes in bluez was what broke these things for end users not systemd so it should be blamed and yes the user has to wait until bugs have been fixed as always.

How well or poorly transitions are, is depended on the downstream handling that transition and how well it got tested before going live.

You can have a look at the Fedora feature page to get the scope of that change and components it affected ( which does not include systemd or dbus for that matter ) and this transition required coordination between the kernel team, the desktop teams and several package maintainers and testers to test all those changes then for example compare that with how the transition was handled in the distribution you use.

1. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Bluez5