Re: PSA: Avoid Debian Stable

[Martin Steigerwald <martin@lichtvoll.de>]

Kent Overstreet - 07.08.24, 21:55:09 CEST:
> On Wed, Aug 07, 2024 at 08:58:23PM GMT, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> > I amended the subject line a bit. I am not sure whether Debian Testing
> > or Debian Unstable should also be avoided.
> 
> Unstable as well - unstable is stuck at 1.9.1 and tools is up to 1.9.4,
> and it's their policy of switching rust dependencies to distro packages
> that broke the build.

Experimental meanwhile has 1.9.4.

But I do find this quite sad and concerning:

https://jonathancarter.org/2024/08/29/orphaning-bcachefs-tools-in-debian/

I do not completely agree with removing it from Debian Unstable aka Sid at 
this time, but if upstream development continues like this until too short 
before Debian 13 aka Trixie release I can somewhat understand. However it 
would still be good to have it there for people who use Debian Sid to 
test.

I more and more come to the conclusion myself that BCacheFS might be just 
a tad bit too much of a moving target for me at the moment.

BTRFS can be used just fine in Debian Stable meanwhile. But it took quite a 
while to get there. Version of btrfs-progs in Unstable is available as a 
backport for Debian stable. As far as I understand this cannot be done 
with BCacheFS tools without putting all the dependencies as is into the 
package and violating the principle to package a library dependency in one 
place and be able to update it for security updates in one place for all 
the applications and tools depending on it to benefit from them in one go.

I hope that at one point it can be like this for BCacheFS as well. And I 
am fine with this point being several years away.

Of course distributions with relaxed policies may not have a problem with 
packaging all the dependencies within a bcache-tools package. But this is 
not Debian or Ubuntu… or quite a lot of derivatives. I bet this is also 
not RHEL or SLES and derivatives of those.

-- 
Martin