All seems splendid

I think it’s worth commenting that Sympl seems to symply work just fine. The lack of drama is lovely!
Of course, my next thought is about whether Sympl will be ready for the next version of Debian, followed by wondering how the general development of Sympl is going.
But mostly I want to say “thank you” for something that’s working so well, month in, month out.

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Yes, running very nicely for me too, and remarkably resilient considering how much I’ve messed around adding bits of my own, while the basic functionality of Sympl just keeps running.
I do hope we’ll get a Bullseye-compatible update in good time, but Sympl was pretty quick in catching up with Buster, so I’m quietly confident.
Thanks Kelduum - good job!

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I totally agree. Symbiosis started out really well but fell a staff left and Bytemark changed hands. In the Sympl guise things have been more stable and kept up to date in good time. My thanks go out to everyone who has worked so hard in both forms of the package. I prefer it to any overblown cPanel based setup by a country mile.

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Thanks for your kind words, everyone!

Yes, there is a Sympl 11 for Bullseye coming, and like Buster it should be live on the same day and date as the OS itself (we actually released the day before in the case of Buster!).

The development has been slow but steady over the last year thanks to COVID-19, but there’s a lot of work going on behind the scenes to make Sympl future-proof and easier to support and expand going forward, so it’s not reliant on unpackaged third party libraries as Symbiosis was.

There’s a good amount of technical debt to pay off, but I’m hoping we’ll have something to show regarding that some time in the next few months.

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There’s been talk of several functional enhancements too. Will they come with Sympl 11, or be added separately?

The plan is to bring them to all current versions of Sympl (so Stretch, Buster and Bullseye) as they are added, with feature parity across all (current) versions, backporting where possible, but there won’t always be feature parity where packages differ.

Sympl will continue to receive rolling feature updates, with new functionality added when they’re ready to the unstable, testing and then stable branches, similar to the Debian process. I’m still looking into the best way to make sure Sympl admins find out about these though, without a mailing list of forum post.

Eventually, Sympl 9 will be retired a little after Debian Stretch reaches LTS end-of-life and stops receiving security updates (currently scheduled for June 2022).

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