Debian APT announced the "Rust Edict": Architectures that are not supported within six months will be phased out

For the sake of "security", more and more organizations have joined the camp of the Rust programming language.

Recently, Julian Andres Klode, a developer from the Debian community, issued a statement announcing that starting from May 2026, Debian's APT package management tool will mandate the use of the Rust toolchain.

He emphasized, "If the Rust toolchain is not available for the ports you maintain, make sure to have it equipped within the next six months; otherwise, the ports will be phased out."

This news has worried many Debian users and developers. It means that all architectures of Debian must support Rust. For ports that currently lack Rust support, they either need to develop the support as soon as possible or may be phased out.

Reasons for Debian to Mandate the Use of Rust

Julian Andres Klode wrote in the announcement, "Introduce a hard dependency on Rust and Rust code in APT. Initially, it involves the Rust compiler and standard library, as well as the Sequoia ecosystem. In particular, our code for parsing .deb, .ar, and .tar files, as well as the code related to HTTP signature verification, will greatly benefit from a memory - safe language and more comprehensive unit - testing methods."

He also said, "For the entire project, it is very important to move forward and rely on modern tools and technologies, rather than being dragged down by trying to run modern software on old devices."

What Impacts Will This Bring?

Currently, some less popular Debian ports, such as m68k, Hewlett Packard Precision Architecture (HPPA), SuperH/SH4, and Alpha, are facing challenges due to the lack of comprehensive Rust support.

Some users analyzed, "If a platform cannot compile and run Rust code, it cannot run future versions of Debian. Although there are already many Rust packages, they are not essential for the basic installation, and users can still choose not to install any Rust packages to use Debian. Currently, APT is compiled with C++, but in the future, some components will be rewritten in Rust, which means APT will contain both C++ and Rust code. If there is no available Rust compiler for some niche CPU architectures, these architectures will not be able to compile or run APT."

He also listed specific architectures: "Among the currently maintained Debian ports, only DEC Alpha, HP PA - RISC, and Hitachi SH - 4 (Dreamcast CPU) have no Rust compiler at all. Although the Motorola 68000 (Amiga and early Macintosh) has partial Rust support, the functionality is not sufficient to support Debian, so it is also at risk of being phased out."

Community Reactions

The Debian community has mixed reactions to this decision.

Netizen ben0x539 said, "This statement makes people uncomfortable because it refers to the ports that don't want to support Rust as doing 'retro computing', which sounds like a hobby rather than a serious engineering task. I fully understand why people feel looked down upon."

Another netizen Quackdoc bluntly said, "It's really embarrassing and completely incomprehensible. I really like Rust, but it is far from being in the state that APT needs. This is a completely crazy move. It's time to consider phasing it out and sending APT back to where it belongs - the trash can."

There are also rational voices. Developer12 commented, "On the one hand, there are certain benefits to this. The security reasons for adopting Rust in the parts listed in the toolchain are indeed reasonable. For some architectures, such as m68k, there are already Rust ports on other operating systems, so it should not be too difficult to implement support on these platforms. In the long run, promoting the use of Rust on more platforms is also a good thing in a sense."

He also pointed out practical problems: "However, this deadline is really too short. Such migrations usually require an announcement one or even two years in advance. Even if a certain architecture/operating system combination theoretically has Rust support, it may take far more than six months to establish full support. At least some ports may need to be tested in Rust Nightly for a long time to be stable. More importantly, some architectures on the list do not have LLVM support at all, and it is impossible to have other back - ends in the short term. Even if someone is willing to do the compiler porting work, there is simply not enough time to complete it."

As ebee_matteo commented:

For me, it's clear: either developers come forward to fix the Rust support for these ports within six months, or these ports will continue to use the old version of APT and will eventually be phased out as official Debian ports.

If there is a large enough community for these architectures, the corresponding developers should focus on expanding compiler support and fixing the crates that cannot be compiled. Otherwise, it's just another signal indicating that these architectures do not have enough developers to support continuous cross - platform compatibility work.

Maintainers have limited time, and ensuring that their software can be compiled on installations that only account for 0.1% is still a heavy burden. This is not even a debate between Rust and non - Rust, but rather 'whether this port itself has enough developers and users'.

What do you think of this announcement?

References:

https://lists.debian.org/debian - devel/2025/10/msg00285.html

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian - APT - Will - Require - Rust

This article is from the WeChat public account "CSDN", organized by Tu Min, and published by 36Kr with authorization.