Debian: Upgrades, Steve McIntyre Turns 50, and Rust Becoming "an unmaintainable mess for stable-minded distribution vendors."
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University of Toronto ☛ How not to upgrade (some) held packages on Ubuntu (and Debian)
The problem with this is that it upgrades all held packages, not just the kernel. I have historically gotten away with this on the machines I do this on, but recently I got burned (well, more burned my co-workers); as part of a kernel upgrade I also upgraded another package that caused some problems.
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Steve McIntyre ☛ Steve McIntyre: A birthday gift to remember!
Warning: If you're not into meat, you might want to skip the rest of this...
This year, I turned 50. Wow. Lots of friends and family turned up to help me celebrate, with a BBQ (of course!). I was very grateful for a lovely set of gifts from those awesome people, and I have a number of driving experiences to book in the next year or so. I'm going to have so much fun driving silly cars on and off road!
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Phoronix ☛ Debian Orphans Bcachefs-Tools: "Impossible To Maintain In Debian Stable"
Even before the Bcachefs file-system driver was accepted into the mainline kernel, Debian for the past five years has offered a "bcachefs-tools" package to provide the user-space programs to this copy-on-write file-system. It was simple at first when it was simple C code but since the Bcachefs tools transitioned to Rust, it's become an unmaintainable mess for stable-minded distribution vendors. As such the bcachefs-tools package has now been orphaned by Debian...
An update
More on Rust:
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Jonathan Carter: Orphaning bcachefs-tools in Debian
Around a decade ago, I was happy to learn about bcache – a GNU/Linux block cache system that implements tiered storage (like a pool of hard disks with SSDs for cache) on Linux. At that stage, ZFS on GNU/Linux was nowhere close to where it is today, so any progress on gaining more ZFS features in general GNU/Linux systems was very welcome. These days we care a bit less about tiered storage, since any cost benefit in using anything else than nvme tends to quickly evaporate compared to time you eventually lose on it.