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.
OSTechNix:
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Debian Developer Orphans Bcachefs-Tools Package Due to Upstream Conflicts
Carter first packaged bcachefs-tools in 2020, attracted by bcachefs's potential as a powerful Linux filesystem, similar to ZFS. Unfortumnately, the situation took a turn in late 2023 when bcachefs-tools version 1.2 introduced Rust components. This change sparked the conflict.
Debian’s policy encourages using the same version of a library across all packages to simplify security updates and long-term maintenance. This policy, which arises from a past vulnerability incident involving zlib, discourages bundling dependencies within individual packages (a practice known as "vendoring").
However, the Rust code in bcachefs-tools relied on specific versions of several dependencies. When Carter tried to loosen these dependency requirements to comply with Debian’s policy, the upstream developer pushed back. They strongly supported strict vendoring and refused to support a wider range of dependency versions.
This disagreement made it difficult to maintain bcachefs-tools within Debian’s stable releases. The upstream developer’s insistence on using specific dependency versions clashed with Debian’s need for a stable and maintainable package ecosystem.