Is it just me, or does that seem .. abrupt?
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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Debian's APT Will Soon Begin Requiring Rust: Debian Ports Need To Adapt Or Be Sunset
(www.phoronix.com)
There's time until March for the maintainers of the 3 niche architectures to organize and make rust available for them. Doesn't sound that abrupt to me
For small niches, six months can be rather aprupt.
My niche can take 5 days or 5 months, depending on ADHD
Wasn't there a Rust-to-C compiler that would circumvent this limitation?
Yes. There is also a GCC front-end for Rust (does not go to C first).
Rust adds another layer of trusting the compiler isn't backdoored. All UNIX/Linux systems use the gcc toolchain, so having it written in C would mean less dependencies for the OS.
- paraphrased from someone who seemed to know more about this stuff in this unrelated discussion yesterday
Strange times.
There's an ongoing effort to get gcc to compile Rust.^[https://lwn.net/Articles/907405/]
For package maintainers, it's reasonable to expect security updates are rolled out the same week that a vulnerability is found. If you can't deploy a new version of a package in 6 months, not maintaining the package is also a valid option.
but this is not a vulnerability, but adding a cpu architecture to a programming language
The timeline is not super abrupt, especially for architectures where all he is asking is to ensure that your Rust toolchain is in order. That is especially true when you consider that Rust is already well maintained on all the Debian architectures that people actually use.
The abruptness (almost rudeness) is in the second part where he basically says that, if you cannot get Rust going in time, you should just stop releasing Debian for that architecture.
It is mostly just poorly worded though. Because none of these architectures have “official” support even now. This will not be the only way they are behind. So, there is not reason to be so dramatic.
And that would be my response to him. Another option here is that these alternative architectures just continue to ship an older version of APT for now. Emergency avoided. Few of them ship with up-to-date versions of APT even now.
Another solution is to use one of the multiple projects that is working to make Rust code build with the GCC compiler back-end. At least one of these projects has already announced that they want to work with these Debian variants to ensure that APT builds with them.
So, the 6 month timeline is a reasonable impetus to make that happen which would be quite a good thing beyond just APT.
There are many other useful tools written in Rust you are going to want to use on these architectures. It will be a fantastic outcome if this pressure from APT kickstarts that happening for some of these long abandoned architectures (by the mainstream at least).
Still gonna use Debian.
Yeah, it's pretty good. But now that I've started studying, and don't have time for learning it (I've literally made a personal wiki with various documentation for myself), so I am thinking to switching to atomic distro instead (maybe KDE Linux).
So thats why whenever I try to find a package in apt, I have to iterate through thousands of simiparly named librust-{dictionaryword}-{component}-dev packages in order to find the simple component I want... Apt repos have really been trying too hard for granularity, I'm pretty sure there are more librust áckages than actual end-user program packages.
Tells something about apt. Not because Rust bad or anything, but because Rust is more like C++ than C.
What does this mean for the end-user? By how they worded it...
the APT packaging tool next year will begin requiring a Rust compiler
it seems like you need a Rust compiler as a dependency for simply having Apt installed on your system.
Debian and most distros based on it do not even install a C++ compiler by default, and apt is mostly written in C++.
oh man, and here I was about to finish migration to Debian.
Are you migrating to Debian on a niche CPU architecture? If not, this doesn't affect you.
currently running on a P2 333mhz. I guess it's pretty common though.
Didn't Debian drop i386? Are you running Debian Bookworm?
bookworm? that's a stretch....😉
That joke's so funny, it's making me a bit wheezy...