16.1. Upcoming Developments
Weeks (or months) before a new version of Debian is released, the Release Manager picks the codename for the next version. Now that Debian version 8 is out, the developers are already busy working on the next version, codenamed Stretch…
There is no official list of planned changes, and Debian never makes promises relating to technical goals of the coming versions. However, a few development trends can already be noted, and we can try some bets on what might happen (or not).
In order to improve security and trust, most if not all the packages will be made to build reproducibly; that is to say, it will be possible to rebuild byte-for-byte identical binary packages from the source packages, thus allowing everyone to verify that no tampering has happened during the builds.
In a related theme, a lot of effort will have gone into improving security by default, and mitigating both “traditional” attacks and the new threats implied by mass surveillance.
Of course, all the main software suites will have had a major release. The latest version of the various desktops will bring better usability and new features. Wayland, the new display server that is being developed to replace X11 with a more modern alternative, will be available (although maybe not default) for at least some desktop environments.
A new feature of the archive maintenance software, “bikesheds”, will allow developers to host special-purpose package repositories in addition to the main repositories; this will allow for personal package repositories, repositories for software not ready to go into the main archive, repositories for software that has only a very small audience, temporary repositories for testing new ideas, and so on.
