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by yetanother12345 899 days ago
Possibly OT, or tangential. But then this is HN, so

> Various Package Managers

Quite a long list at the right side, but... no Debian?

I'd think that the user base of Debian would be larger than of some of the other distros listed (edit: changed wording here) there, so ...what up? why?

This is not the first time I've witnessed this exact situation during the past half a year or so. Is this some weird conspiracy among Rust devs (joke!), or is it the Rust tooling that makes integrating into the apt ecosystem a challenge, or what?

I mean, if I really insisted on getting that tool installed I see there's a binary, and if there was not, I'd find a way, but I'm genuinely curious. This seems counterintuitive, so there must be a reason? no?
5 comments
not_the_fda 899 days ago
A lot of them are in the red.

I think the reason is that its built using rust, which moves fast and breaks things, very un-Debian.

This tool requires rust 0.65 which is old by rust standards. The latest debian stable has rust 0.63.

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mschuster91 898 days ago
> I'd think that the user base of Debian would be larger than of some of the other distros listed (edit: changed wording here) there, so ...what up? why?

Debian packaging is notoriously difficult and has a very steep learning curve if you want to do it "the right way" aka using Debian's arcane collection of debhelper Perl scripts.

On top of that, there was/is/IDK a lengthy period of debate in Debian on how to deal with third party library managers in general (PHP Composer and especially NodeJS started the debate), which scared people off for good.

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da39a3ee 898 days ago
Hi, this is completely normal. Debian has a very lengthy process for accepting packages. Other places you just submit a PR. It's normal for open source projects to only get into Debian after a few years when they can genuinely say they are established/popular/stable.
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yetanother12345 898 days ago
Thanks all below, I was not aware. I'm (a little) wiser now.
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steveklabnik 899 days ago
I mean, there's tools that make it easy to make a .deb https://crates.io/crates/cargo-deb

The Rust Project itself had put a lot of work into making sure that Rust and Rust-using programs could get into Debian by working with Debian folks to address issues.

I suspect that you've run into an anecdotal pattern, but I'm not sure that it is more than that.

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