Re: PSA: Avoid Debian Stable

[Martin Steigerwald <martin@lichtvoll.de>]

I amended the subject line a bit. I am not sure whether Debian Testing or 
Debian Unstable should also be avoided.

And by the way, you probably have the same issue with Ubuntu, unless they 
update bcachefs-tools to new versions in stable releases.

Carl E. Thompson - 07.08.24, 19:43:17 CEST:
> Whether or not the concept of Debian is a good idea probably isn't a
> constructive discussion for this list.
> 
> The problem here is that what was essentially an _alpha_ piece of
> software for what at the time was essentially an _alpha_ filesystem was
> allowed into the _stable_ release of Debian at all. Whoever on the
> Debian side allowed its inclusion dropped the ball.

An option would be to at least ask for a backport.

Whether that is feasible with system based Rust packages in Debian 12 aka 
Bookworm is another story. Or probably there might also be a way to ask 
for removal of the outdated bcachefs-tools package. I agree it has been 
too early to include it in Debian 12. There are users who expect 1. stable 
and 2. most current software. I.e. expect they could use up-to-date 
BCacheFS in Debian 12. But the development process of Debian does not 
really cater for that. Either you have quite recent software, but face 
temporary instabilities or you have stable and soon to be outdated 
software.

One idea to use system based packages is to fix security issues once, 
instead of recompiling a lot of packages that use their own version of 
some Rust dependency.

For Debian 13 I expect BCacheFS tools to be stable enough for inclusion 
into stable release. However… that would still not solve the issue with 
fixing bugs in there during stable support – unless there would be some 
kind of LTS branch of BCacheFS tools by then. Critical fixes probably could 
be backported, that is the usual approach for Debian packages in stable, 
but this also does not work with Firefox ESR after a certain point. They 
update it to the newest ESR once the support for the old one is dropped by 
Mozilla. Cause it would be too much work to backport all security fixes.

Best would probably be to have a bcachefs-tools backport even for Debian 
13. If possible.

Best,
-- 
Martin