The Debian project is pleased to announce the second update of its stable distribution Debian 10 (codename buster). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.
Debian users probably already have this installed, because Debian package management is awesome and you can pry APT from my cold, dead hands and yes I’m totally biased when I say that APT is massively better than any of its alternatives.
Sue me.
One noteworthy thing is that Firefox even ESR now needs GCC, Rust, and Node.JS to build. On the one hand, it’s cool that we’re seeing more modern programming languages get traction. On the other, most of these languages are never going to get ported to more obscure CPU architectures unless Debian, Gentoo, and the BSD guys push patches upstream.
Rust at least uses LLVM as the backend, so you should be able to build for any architecture that LLVM can target.
And, it look like a lot of new languages use LLVM as the back end, as it makes building and porting the language easier.
So, Firefox should be able to be ported to new archs pretty easy!
Well, relatively easy for a huge codebase like Firefox.
> So, Firefox should be able to be ported to new archs pretty easy!
Not so. Firefox is written in Rust/C++/C. All three languages are capable of portability; Rust and LLVM add nothing new here. Firefox includes a JavaScript JIT compiler though, and porting a JIT is never trivial.
Also, but not strictly relevant: Firefox also has operating-system-specific optimisations [1]. Unlikely to apply when porting to a new CPU ISA though.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20875990
X86, ARM, POWER, and RISC-V. Are there any other architectures at this point?
“I’m totally biased when I say that APT is massively better than any of its alternatives.”
I also like apt a lot, but that’s a very bold claim. Please name one thing that apt supports, but yum/dnf doesn’t. In the meantime I’ll tell you about yum/dnf’s rollback feature, which apt is missing. In yum/dnf you also don’t need to update the list of packages manually and you install packages straight from a URL.
This challenge is also not about deb vs rpm or the quality or quantity of the packages in the repositories. This is strictly between apt vs its alternatives. That’s why I’m not considering Gentoo’s Portage, my personal preference.
I have a lot of experience with APT, but I personally feel that the most intelligent and reliable package manager is SUSE/openSUSE’s zypp. It has never failed me, even when making huge leaps (pun not intended) from a very old installation all the way to the latest and greatest. You can even upgrade/downgrade between the stable Leap branch and the rolling Tumbleweed branch. Upgrades work perfectly with additional 3rd party repos enabled, and unlike APT it’s very easy to avoid packages from unexpectedly switching to the version from a different repo.
Zypper is a nice package manager, but OpenSuse just has really small repos compared to Debian, especially on non-x86.
I use a lot of esoteric packages, and openSUSE’s repos really haven’t disappointed me. Plus the OBS repos almost always have multiple versions of a given package if it’s not in the official repo. You should check out openSUSE again if you haven’t done so recently.