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.

From John Carter’s blog, Orphaning bcachefs-tools in Debian:

"So, back in April the Rust dependencies for bcachefs-tools in Debian didn’t at all match the build requirements. I got some help from the Rust team who says that the common practice is to relax the dependencies of Rust software so that it builds in Debian. So errno, which needed the exact version 0.2, was relaxed so that it could build with version 0.4 in Debian, udev 0.7 was relaxed for 0.8 in Debian, memoffset from 0.8.5 to 0.6.5, paste from 1.0.11 to 1.08 and bindgen from 0.69.9 to 0.66.

I found this a bit disturbing, but it seems that some Rust people have lots of confidence that if something builds, it will run fine. And at least it did build, and the resulting binaries did work, although I’m personally still not very comfortable or confident about this approach (perhaps that might change as I learn more about Rust).

With that in mind, at this point you may wonder how any distribution could sanely package this. The problem is that they can’t. Fedora and other distributions with stable releases take a similar approach to what we’ve done in Debian, while distributions with much more relaxed policies (like Arch) include all the dependencies as they are vendored upstream."

…

With this in mind (not even considering some hostile emails that I recently received from the upstream developer or his public rants on lkml and reddit), I decided to remove bcachefs-tools from Debian completely. Although after discussing this with another DD, I was convinced to orphan it instead, which I have now done.

    • Laser
      71·
      4 months ago

      The only hint at the other topic I see is this:

      (not even considering some hostile emails that I recently received from the upstream developer or his public rants on lkml and reddit)

      I guess this is about https://www.reddit.com/r/bcachefs/comments/1em2vzf/psa_avoid_debian/, and while I think the title is too broad, the actual message is

      If you’re running bcachefs, you’ll want to be on a more modern distro - or building bcachefs-tools yourself.

      I don’t consider Kent’s reasoning (also further down the thread) a rant - it might not be the most diplomatic, but he’s not the only one who has problems with Debian’s processes. The xscreensaver developer is another one for similar reasons.

      I think, in fairness, bcachefs and Debian currently aren’t a good fit. bcachefs is also in the kernel so users can rest it and report, but it wasn’t meant to be stable; it’s meant to not lose data unrecoverably.

      Anyhow, while I think that he’s also not the easiest person on the LKML, I don’t consider him ranting there; and with the author’s and my judgement differing in these points, I’m led to believe that we might also disagree on what qualifies as hostile.

      Lastly, while I’m not a big fan of how Rust packaging works, it ensures that the program is built exactly the same on the developer’s and other machines (for users and distributors); it is somewhat ironic to see Debian complain about it, since they do understand the importance of reproducibility.

      You must have missed the last half of the post then. Especially the last two paragraphs.

      There’s isn’t much more to that issue than that sentence, while all other paragraphs cover the packaging. It’s tangential at best.