Capítulo 16. Conclusão: O Futuro do Debian

Agora que a versão 11 do Debian foi lançada, os desenvolvedores já estão ocupados trabalhando na próxima versão, codinome Bookworm…

Não há uma lista oficial de todas as mudanças planejadas, e o Debian nunca faz promessas relacionadas aos objetivos técnicos das próximas versões. No entanto, algumas tendências de desenvolvimento e tópicos de discussão já podem ser observados, e podemos tentar adivinhar o que pode acontecer (ou não). Algumas das mudanças esperadas estão documentadas nas notas de lançamento do Debian 11:

Beyond usual deprecation of some software components, it is worth pointing out that Debian is in the process of switching to what is known as a merged-usr filesystem: in this scheme /bin, /sbin and /lib are symlinks pointing to the corresponding directories in /usr. This improves compatibility between all Unix systems, makes us closer of having all Debian-supplied files in a single top-level directory that can be easily protected, snapshotted or shared. You can learn more about the benefits here:

This important change is not without creating issues: dpkg will have to learn about those aliased directories, but the dpkg maintainer doesn't like the technical solution deployed by Debian and hasn't yet made the required changes. The Debian technical committee's help has been requested multiple times already. Their last decision can be found here:

apt-key will become obsolete. The key management for third party repositories should only rely on keys found in /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d or configured via Signed-By as described in Seção 6.6, “Verificando Autenticidade do Pacote”.

For some tasks the default software solution will change. As an example: plocate might be a faster and smaller replacement for mlocate. systemd will continue to add new features that help to standardize the boot process and system management, allowing us to get rid of some other software in the base system.

Of course all the main software suites will have a major release. The latest version of the various desktops will bring better usability and new features.

The default permission of home directories will be more restrictive, allowing only the user to access their files.

Developments which already began will continue: Improve build reproducibility and security for example. With the widespread use of continuous integration and the growth of the archive (and of the biggest packages!), the constraints on release architectures will be harder to meet and architectures will be dropped.