It’s been four long months since Alpha 7 of Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” hit the testing channels back in July, but the wait was worth it as the Alpha 8 release adds a huge number of changes, starting with initial support for the GNU Screen terminal multiplexer and lots of debootstrap fixes, which now defaults to merged-/usr. However, debootstrap also received support for package indices compressed with the very popular XZ method, as well as support for downloading and validating InRelease files. It also looks like the installation guide was updated with support for the MIPS64el architecture, but the PowerPC (PPC) and GNU/kFreeBSD ones were removed.