[richard_todd]

ipchains is a perfect representation of what I want to see. They introduced it as an option alongside ipfirewall in 2.1, made it the default but allowed fallback to ipfirewall in 2.2, and removed ipfirewall in 2.4. That is a sane way to introduce a large breaking change. Not to mention they provided compatibility scripts to try to smooth over the user-side differences.

They certainly did NOT say "I'm replacing ipfirewall with ipchains in six months, and if your distro can't handle it you should sunset your distro."

It shouldn't be controversial to request a measured approach when making major changes to software lots of people depend on. That's part of the burden of working on important software. Note I'm not against apt or anything moving to rust.

edit: spelling

[throwaway7356]

Ah, so the same that seems to be happening here? As https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/10/msg00288.html says Rust is already a requirement on all but four architectures:

> Rust is already a hard requirement on all Debian release architectures and ports except for alpha, hppa, m68k, and sh4 (which do not provide sqv).

And just like with the kernel the fallback gets removed eventually.

[richard_todd]

If you think a situation where everyone had access to ipchains for 3 years to figure out how to migrate is similar to a situation where some architectures will be killed in six months without ever having had access to the new product then I don't know how to help you. What can affected ports do? Implementing a toolchain backend is a tall order.

We didn't talk about your gcc-to-c++ example, but if you read up on it you will know they took the pulse of affected developers, started experimental branches, made presentations, and made sure no architectures were left behind. All of which this Debian developer is failing to do.

Look I don't even disagree with the ultimate result... I don't think Debian needs to indefinitely support every strange port it has built up over the years. The way it's being done, though, doesn't sit right. There are far more mature ways to steer a big ship. Your own examples are showing the way.