Raspbian Stretch Release Date?

[levelcrow]

EDIT (June 24, 2017): To all coming through Google, according to the recent blog post https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/a-rasp ... ing-tools/, Raspbian Stretch will be released sometime Summer 2017.

It was announced yesterday that Debian Stretch will be released on June 17, 2017.

Are any of the RPF or Raspbian people open to sharing how things are looking in terms of the Raspbian Stretch release date?

[runboy93]

Following years.

[DougieLawson]

It was announced yesterday that Debian Stretch will be released on June 17, 2017.

Are any of the RPF or Raspbian people open to sharing how things are looking in terms of the Raspbian Stretch release date?

There's already a large part of Raspbian Stretch that's already built and ready to go. Two of my Raspberries are running it. The missing piece is the Raspberry Pi special modifications like Pixel and the WiFi stuff, the kernel and boot loader. They aren't ready yet.

You can begin the migration by updating /etc/apt/sources.list. You can NOT change /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list as that's the missing piece.

Code: Select all

Err:5 http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian stretch/ui armhf Packages
  404  Not Found [IP: 2a00:1098:0:82:1000:13:0:9 80]

[W. H. Heydt]

Any hope of an easier transition this time?

[levelcrow]

Dougie, but that's the stuff that makes Raspbian Raspbian rather than Debian

W. H. Heydt, I heard that the Jessie transition was delayed because of the systemd change. I too wonder how the Stretch change will go.

I'm very excited to be able to run LibreOffice 5 on my Raspberry Pi, given the massive bug hunt that happened. I wonder if the Raspbian people have any surprises in terms of hardware acceleration we'll get to experience.

[ktb]

Any hope of an easier transition this time?

I think it should go a lot more smoothly than Wheezy to Jessie. I've upgraded Jessie to Stretch a couple times without any big problems.

[bensimmo]

What are the main changes a normal user would send (w.r.t. Pi) from Jessie other than newer versions of software.

Anything different in the way we do things?

[DougieLawson]

What are the main changes a normal user would send (w.r.t. Pi) from Jessie other than newer versions of software.

Anything different in the way we do things?

Nothing. It's just a whole lot of newer old versions of stuff that isn't as ancient as Jessie or Wheezy. DebIan is always full of pieces of software that are very much at the trailing edge of software development.

The average user isn't going to notice anything other than the name change.

[bensimmo]

Ah good, I had to alter a lot from wheezy.
Ah yes the new old software, at least Fritzing will be up to date and include the Pi's in the modelling, though Arduino will still be way out of date iirc (must try the web based ide)

[TimSmall]

DebIan is always full of pieces of software that are very much at the trailing edge of software development.

That seems like a bit of a needlessly negative way of putting things. Debian's focus is on stability, and breadth of package and platform availability - as well as smoothness of upgrading.

For most software, Debian 9 - Stretch will contain the versions of software which were the latest stable versions as of the date that Debian went into 'freeze' - in Jan 2017. There are exceptions of course (such as the arduino packages) - which may be for many reasons - either technical or just lack of resources (in either case - feel free to step up and fix that!).

Some software - e.g. web browsers - will be updated during the life of the release, the rest will stay largely the same (except for significant bug and security fixes). Newer versions of some software becomes available during the lifetime of the release via 'backports'.

[DougieLawson]

For most software, Debian 9 - Stretch will contain the versions of software which were the latest stable versions as of the date that Debian went into 'freeze' - in Jan 2017. There are exceptions of course (such as the arduino packages) - which may be for many reasons - either technical or just lack of resources (in either case - feel free to step up and fix that!).

Exactly, so everything will be close to nine months out of date by the time Raspbian 9 is generally available.

That doesn't work with any kind of agile development. DebIan is based on the old waterfall model which should have been left in the 20th century.

[rpdom]

DebIan is based on the old waterfall model which should have been left in the 20th century.

So how come so many systems use it?

Security, Stability and Reliability. Seriously important in any professional production server. Not quite so important on a hobbyist system, admittedly.

[DougieLawson]

DebIan is based on the old waterfall model which should have been left in the 20th century.

So how come so many systems use it?

Security, Stability and Reliability. Seriously important in any professional production server. Not quite so important on a hobbyist system, admittedly.

That's where Ubuntu wins, they've got a much more dynamic upgrade process and it doesn't leave you with ancient versions of stuff that's missing the features you need.

[rpdom]

DebIan is based on the old waterfall model which should have been left in the 20th century.

So how come so many systems use it?

Security, Stability and Reliability. Seriously important in any professional production server. Not quite so important on a hobbyist system, admittedly.

That's where Ubuntu wins, they've got a much more dynamic upgrade process and it doesn't leave you with ancient versions of stuff that's missing the features you need.

Hahaha! Ubuntu is so unstable. It breaks all the time.

I (like many others) would never use Ubuntu on a production server. It's ok for desktops and laptops, but even then you get issues.

[gkreidl]

Hahaha! Ubuntu is so unstable. It breaks all the time.

I (like many others) would never use Ubuntu on a production server. It's ok for desktops and laptops, but even then you get issues.

+1
Meanwhile I only use LTS versions and I never upgrade to a new LTS version until it is at least 4-6 months old.

[bensimmo]

.snipping to many quotes...

(like many others) would never use Ubuntu on a production server. It's ok for desktops and laptops, but even then you get issues.

I don't think Raspian is targeted as a production server though, a desktop Education and fettling tool yes. But not a dedicated server setup.
Who cares what a production server system would use. If you do look at a server OS/Distribution.

[rpdom]

.snipping to many quotes...

(like many others) would never use Ubuntu on a production server. It's ok for desktops and laptops, but even then you get issues.

I don't think Raspian is targeted as a production server though, a desktop Education and fettling tool yes. But not a dedicated server setup.
Who cares what a production server system would use. If you do look at a server OS/Distribution.

A great many people do care if an update breaks their Pi.

[W. H. Heydt]

.snipping to many quotes...

(like many others) would never use Ubuntu on a production server. It's ok for desktops and laptops, but even then you get issues.

I don't think Raspian is targeted as a production server though, a desktop Education and fettling tool yes. But not a dedicated server setup.
Who cares what a production server system would use. If you do look at a server OS/Distribution.

It's not that I care what a production server would use (though I do use Raspbian in such a context and there I care very much about stability and reliability) for my Pis, but I strongly value having a stable, reliable system that Just Runs. I don't need "bleeding edge" releases but I certainly want ones I don't have spend endless amounts of time trying to figure out why what worked yesterday won't work today.

[levelcrow]

You can switch to Debian Sid if you want new. if you want really new then you can build your own packages and kernel.

I'm excited for Raspbian Stretch because it's going to have a lot of work put in by the Foundation and Broadcom, as well as by independent contributors. The shift in focus onto software development by the Foundation happened between Jessie and now. A lot of patches have gone into major packages like xserver and mesa.

I'm not saying we should expect something huge with this new release, but it's not going to be nothing. There's a lot of work that goes into a Raspbian release by everyone including Pi people. It's something we should recognize and acknowledge.

[PeterO]

Planned release of stretch on 2017-06-17
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-a ... 00002.html

You might try reading at least the first in a thread before replying !

PeterO

[CarlRJ]

A great many people do care if an update breaks their Pi.

I think one of the problems is that Pi's are used in many different ways by many different people. Some are long-running servers, some are experimental bits on a workbench, some are dedicated appliances of a sort (media servers and such), still others are a mixture of multiple uses. In some situations, stability is king, in others, it's holding things back. One can't really talk about any one case as if it were universal.

I have half a dozen Pi's running 24/7. For some of them, running stable is more important than having the latest versions of software, and others are more experimental and I very much would like the latest versions of at least a few things (especially useful for making scripts work cross platform).

I can understand why the Foundation goes the Debian (Wheezy/Jessie/...) route, because there's more stability which usually equates to less variables to worry about. But I do wish there were some official (or just officially recognized) mechanism for installing newer versions of select packages. In my case, I'd love to have the latest Python3. Yes, I absolutely can compile it myself (there would likely be hoops to jump through to not break things supported by the shipping version of Python3, and time spent figuring out what those hoops are). But if potentially thousands of people wanted the same thing, it'd be nice to have a way to just download packages for it (from some officially annointed site, not someone's random web page) - it would save a lot of duplication of effort.

[TimG]

Newer versions of some software becomes available during the lifetime of the release via 'backports'.

Although Raspbian currently does not have a backports section

[hommar]

I think good idea for make two official distro
First distro can used for long-running servers (and desktop too). It based on Debian, and work on RPI1+
Second distro can used for desktop with last soft (and more experimental servers). It based on Ubuntu, and work RPI2+ (compile for arm7 for faster)
A similar idea is used on RedHat/Fedora

[kusti8]

I have half a dozen Pi's running 24/7. For some of them, running stable is more important than having the latest versions of software, and others are more experimental and I very much would like the latest versions of at least a few things (especially useful for making scripts work cross platform).

I think good idea for make two official distro
First distro can used for long-running servers (and desktop too). It based on Debian, and work on RPI1+
Second distro can used for desktop with last soft (and more experimental servers). It based on Ubuntu, and work RPI2+ (compile for arm7 for faster)
A similar idea is used on RedHat/Fedora

And that's never going to happen for a number of reasons. The aim of the Foundation is education. By splitting the OS between two different versions, you just add more confusion. Then you have the extra work needed to maintain two distros. And there would be no need. Armv7 isn't substantially faster in a way that makes a difference. NEON can be enabled on demand.

[Martin Frezman]

More to the point, it already exists. There's Arch, which is totally bleeding edge.

There's several versions of Ubuntu for the Pi floating around.

If you want something more up-to-date than Raspbian, well, the first clue is: What you are looking for isn't Raspbian.