On Debian based (not Ubuntu) what is the package name to install Rust?

[VorfeedCanal]

@parasyte

Except problems clearly still exist and even Rust applications are lambasted as "unpackageable" by the very people working on these problems.

Please read what I wrote. Problems which made distributions necessary no longer longer exist yet their approach makes other problems that do exist unfixable in the distribution paradigm.

@parasyte

and even Rust applications are lambasted as "unpackageable" by the very people working on these problems.

Obviously. Because work done by distributions implicitly assume that others, too, have these exact same problems and spend a lot of efforts trying to solve them.

What distributions are doing is based on the assumption that it's okay to “freeze the world” (to then ship frozen and tried and tested form on tapes, floppies or CDs) and that others would have to deal with these issues, too.

But today it's entirely impossible to do that: different projects have different schedules and, more importantly, developers don't want to spend insane amount of time trying to support long-obsolete libraries (crates) from that “frozen world” release time. Like MMO games expect that you would update their client hours after update is available developers of rust crates expect that they would be able to pick the bugfix hours after it's released on crates.io and rip out the temporary workarounds (if these workarounds were even written in the first place).

This makes pretty much all modern software (not just Rust crates, but also PyPI packages and Node.JS packages) fundamentally incompatible with what distributions expect.

In an era where you were lucky if you had a friend with a modem and could download patches from BIX or CompuServe, where the ability to get updates was a privilege which very few can enjoy, where you had to to deal with years old bugs and had to ensure that obsolete versions of dependencies can still be used… in that world what distributions needed to exist was natural consequence of how development already naturally worked! Their demands weren't onerous.

Today distro makers demand that people would do that same work which they still need, but because this work today is needed solely to make distributions happy others refuse.

Especially since what distributions offer (a way to deliver stuff to people who couldn't afford BIX or CompuServe) is no longer all that valuable.

[parasyte]

@VorfeedCanal

Please read what I wrote.

I do not have a reading comprehension problem but thank you for pointing out some confusion. I was responding directly to your last paragraph. Particularly this statement:

@VorfeedCanal

ultimately, it's hard because distributions are, kind of, already there, and they do solve lots of problems thus attempts to offer better solutions don't have much incentive.

Which is a suspicious thing to claim, because there is quite an incentive to solve the problems distributions do cause. Namely these problems:

@VorfeedCanal

yet their approach makes other problems that do exist unfixable in the distribution paradigm.

I don't know if there is a language barrier or if you are just aggressively agreeing with me.

[VorfeedCanal]

@parasyte

Which is a suspicious thing to claim, because there is quite an incentive to solve the problems distributions do cause.

Not as much as you think. Distributions provide more-or-less stable base OS and if you don't use their packages for Rust development (or Python development, or Node.JS development, or Java development or… any other modern language development, more-or-less) then the fact that distributions also create some serious problems for themselves is not your concern. You can just ignore the fact that they are even shipping some obsolete version of Rust and that's it — problem solved.

Distribution makers are, naturally, not celebrating that solution, but what can they do? Change the license to make it impossible to download Rust from rustup.sh?