[richard_todd]

I'm not sure if it's an insecurity thing or an immaturity thing, but when all these stories pop up, I always wonder why rust enthusiasts don't just prove their point by making their own "modern" and non-"retro" tech. If you can make something better, just do it already, and people will switch to it when they see the benefits. This parasitic "you must accept rust in your long-standing project" model is so off-putting, as is always evident by the complaints it causes. I love projects like Redox that try to do their own thing... why doesn't the rust community rally around projects like that and turn them into cve-free masterpieces that people will want to use?

[jeffparsons]

This email is from a Debian maintainer, about Debian introducing a new hard dependency on Rust. It's not some random Rust advocate telling Debian folks that they should use Rust against their will.

Yes there are absolutely some obnoxious "you should rewrite this in Rust" folks out there, but this is not a case of that.

[richard_todd]

There are like 1000 Debian maintainers, right? This person doesn't speak for the project as a whole, and as far as I can tell he is telling Debian folks they will be accepting rust whether they want it or not, and whether their preferred architecture is supported or not. Maybe there was some organizational vote on this, but if so it isn't referenced in the thread. It says "I plan", not "Debian decided to".

And regardless, my point is it would be more sensible to say "I'm going to introduce an oxidized fork of apt and a method to use it as your system apt if you prefer" and then over the next year or so he could say "look at all these great benefits!" (if there are any). At that point, the community could decide that the rust version should become the default because it is so much better/safer/"modern"/whatever.

[Seattle3503]

Thats exactly what happed with ripgrep. People seem to like it.

[richard_todd]

Exactly! People love ripgrep because of its clear advantages, and had the developers been interested in making posix mode for it, I'm certain at least some distros would have made it the default by now.

[zamalek]

This was done with uutils. I'm daily driving them.