Hi everyone,

The latest release of Debian, the operating system running on all the machines managed by the Tor Project system Administrators (TPA), has been published! We're at release eleven, code name "buster". The press release is here:

https://www.debian.org/News/2021/20210814

And nerds might particularly enjoy the release notes:

https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/amd64/release-notes/index.en.html

On top of the above, Debian 11 ships with tor 0.4.5 while the previous release (Debian 10 "buster") shipped with 0.3.5, back in 2019. Doesn't time fly? (And yes, that's just two years - who said Debian was slow?)

As for TPA, we'll probably start upgrading machines to bullseye soon, but it's a slow process, and it's not actually on the 2021 roadmap yet, so that process *may* just start in 2022.

We will, however, try very hard to avoid creating any more "old" machines, which means that any new machine you request from here on will run the latest and greated, Debian 11 bullseye.

This may mean a slightly bumpier ride, for example if you expect some Python 2 packages, they might just be missing as there's been a large push to remove Python 2 from Debian (which unfortunately did not completely succeed).

Another example is how the "debian:latest" Docker image was broken for a few days after the release. That issue has now been *fixed*, so you can resume using the "debian:latest" and "greatest" (not an actual tag ;) for your GitLab CI builds!

The "known issues" section of the release notes has a lot more information than what would be practical to copy here:

https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/amd64/release-notes/ch-information....

Finally note that I wrote an upgrade guide for my own uses:

https://anarc.at/services/upgrades/bullseye/

Note that it's a highly technical guide aimed at upgrading many machines as quickly as possible. If you have a single laptop or desktop to upgrade, you might want to follow the normal upgrade guide:

https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/amd64/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en...

... but I did use it for my home machine, and a similar guide will eventually be published (and maintained) by TPA for our own infrastructure.

So that's it, enjoy the new release!

a.