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Meandwhile the Canonical employee who's responsible for some aspects of apt has decided to insert rust code. Because of this, and just this, Debian dropped 4 en

Meandwhile the Canonical employee who's responsible for some aspects of apt has decided to insert rust code. Because of this, and just this, Debian dropped 4 entire architectures. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/10/msg00285.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/10/msg00285.html >I plan to introduce hard Rust dependencies and Rust code into APT, no earlier than May 2026. This extends at first to the Rust compiler and standard library, and the Sequoia ecosystem. ... If you maintain a port without a working Rust toolchain, please ensure it has one within the next 6 months, or sunset the port. It's important for the project as whole to be able to move forward and rely on modern tools and technologies and not be held back by trying to shoehorn modern software on retro computing devices. If you think Canonical isn't going to lead Debian around by the nose on this you haven't been paying attention.

bigfishrunning 8mo ago
further down that thread https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/10/msg00288.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/10/msg00288.html ``` Rust is already a hard requirement on all Debian release architectures and ports except for alpha, hppa, m68k, and sh4 (which do not provide sqv). ``` It seems to me that the APT change was just a nail in the coffin of these older architectures, which would have eventually been sunset anyway, due to sqv not being available. If you really want to run some kind of Linux on these very old machines, godspeed, but you can't expect them to be maintained by a project with it's fingers in so many pies forever.
- superkuh 8mo ago
  Yep. And nothing you've linked or pointed out changes the claim I made: that re: rust, Canonical employees are making the decisions, not Debian.
  - bayindirh 8mo ago
    Well, it's not always true. Look at how the proposal for making netplan the default network manager in Debian went. Not good, from Canonical's perspective. Making /tmp behave the way systemd guys want also went not according to plan. The behavior is modified somewhat because of the discussion. Rust's influence doesn't come from Canonical per se, but from its promise to eradicate memory related bugs. The initial hype was off the charts, but it's coming down, and the shortcomings are becoming obvious. Canonical is trying to affect Debian, that's true, but it's not always a given.
    - LtWorf 8mo ago
      The fact that Canonical has always been happy to ship software that they know fully well shouldn't be shipped doesn't fill me with hope that it will even work decently without causing massive issues to everyone (remember when they started to use pulseaudio? In the end it was such a mess that the solution was to abandon it).
      - bigfishrunning 8mo ago
        It was rough for a while, but my debian machine still runs pulseaudio and it works pretty well. I agree that ubuntu doesn't do enough testing before releasing stuff, but I am grateful that so many people are willing to grind themselves against the bugs before they hit more conservative distributions
        LtWorf 8mo ago
        It's deprecated. I think most people moved on to pipewire.
        bayindirh 8mo ago
        Debian migrated everyone to Pipewire a while ago without people noticing it, as they intended. Pipewire is working great.
  - pjmlp 8mo ago
    The thing with open source, and many industry standards like ISO and ECMA, is that who shows up gets to call the shots. So when it isn't going into the right direction that we care, maybe more people with other mindset should join. It is like complaining about who wins elections without bothering to cast a valid vote.
- kayodehakeem 8mo ago
  Remove it right now

bigfishrunning 8mo ago

further down that thread https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/10/msg00288.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/10/msg00288.html ``` Rust is already a hard requirement on all Debian release architectures and ports except for alpha, hppa, m68k, and sh4 (which do not provide sqv). ``` It seems to me that the APT change was just a nail in the coffin of these older architectures, which would have eventually been sunset anyway, due to sqv not being available. If you really want to run some kind of Linux on these very old machines, godspeed, but you can't expect them to be maintained by a project with it's fingers in so many pies forever.

superkuh 8mo ago
Yep. And nothing you've linked or pointed out changes the claim I made: that re: rust, Canonical employees are making the decisions, not Debian.
- bayindirh 8mo ago
  Well, it's not always true. Look at how the proposal for making netplan the default network manager in Debian went. Not good, from Canonical's perspective. Making /tmp behave the way systemd guys want also went not according to plan. The behavior is modified somewhat because of the discussion. Rust's influence doesn't come from Canonical per se, but from its promise to eradicate memory related bugs. The initial hype was off the charts, but it's coming down, and the shortcomings are becoming obvious. Canonical is trying to affect Debian, that's true, but it's not always a given.
  - LtWorf 8mo ago
    The fact that Canonical has always been happy to ship software that they know fully well shouldn't be shipped doesn't fill me with hope that it will even work decently without causing massive issues to everyone (remember when they started to use pulseaudio? In the end it was such a mess that the solution was to abandon it).
    - bigfishrunning 8mo ago
      It was rough for a while, but my debian machine still runs pulseaudio and it works pretty well. I agree that ubuntu doesn't do enough testing before releasing stuff, but I am grateful that so many people are willing to grind themselves against the bugs before they hit more conservative distributions
      - LtWorf 8mo ago
        It's deprecated. I think most people moved on to pipewire.
        bayindirh 8mo ago
        Debian migrated everyone to Pipewire a while ago without people noticing it, as they intended. Pipewire is working great.
- pjmlp 8mo ago
  The thing with open source, and many industry standards like ISO and ECMA, is that who shows up gets to call the shots. So when it isn't going into the right direction that we care, maybe more people with other mindset should join. It is like complaining about who wins elections without bothering to cast a valid vote.
kayodehakeem 8mo ago
Remove it right now