[Pkg-rust-maintainers] Debian Trixie and Rust 2024

[Fabian Grünbichler]

On Wed, Nov 06, 2024 at 11:35:11AM -0800, Josh Triplett wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 28, 2024 at 08:57:48PM +0200, Fabian Grünbichler wrote:
> > On Sun, Jul 28, 2024, at 1:49 AM, Travis Cross wrote:
> > > Greetings.  We understand there to be ongoing discussions about the
> > > selection of the Rust release to include in Debian Trixie, and
> > > relatedly, discussions about the freeze schedule for Trixie.  We've
> > > heard there may be tentative plans to use Rust 1.83 (which we will
> > > release on 2024-11-28) and to freeze in mid-January.  We heard that
> > > you were hoping to freeze the Rust toolchain sooner rather than later
> > > in the upcoming window, due to it being a dependency of many other
> > > things.
> > 
> > Hi (and thanks for reaching out)!
> > 
> > Just for the record, there haven't yet been any real discussions, but rather a rough estimation what seems realistic based on past freeze periods. For past releases the freeze happened around January[0] for toolchain and other key packages[1] (these are frozen first, since any bigger changes there obviously have a lot of knock-on effects in the rest of the packages/archive).
> > 
> > The exact freeze times and policy[2] are not decided by individual maintainers or packaging teams, but by the release team (CC-ed accordingly). None if has yet been finalized/announced for the upcoming Trixie release, but I expect that rustc/cargo will be part of the set of key packages again (compared to the Bookworm release, their usage is even more widespread after all! :)), that those will be frozen first again, and that the rough timeline give or take a few weeks will be similar to that of Bookworm. The historic trend goes towards shorter freezes.
> [...]
> > > We're hoping this schedule information and offer of assistance will
> > > make it easier to make plans for the version of Rust in Trixie.
> > > Thanks again for your work to bring Rust to Debian users and
> > > developers.
> > 
> > FWIW, from the Rust team/rustc maintainer side, I'd be happy to package up 1.85 beta in January if that aligns with the freeze, and then pull in the final release a few weeks later using the regular unblocking process we have during the freeze period. Obviously, under the condition that the release team has no objections :)
> 
> Following up on this: with recent Debian discussions on Trixie freeze
> plans, do you still expect that shipping 1.85 beta and following up with
> the released version will be possible?

Hi,

AFAIK, there hasn't yet been any decision made, neither w.r.t. the
Trixie release timeline in general, nor w.r.t. the implications or
possible exceptions/pre-approved unblocks for the Rust toolchain
packages and 1.85.

But there was a recent thread/call for input on the contents of Trixie's
freeze policy by the Debian Release Team:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2024/11/msg00111.html (link to
my reply)

There's a also a bug I filed that you could subscribe to, if you want to
receive further updates:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1084048

I expect an official response/decision is not too far away, or it won't
matter for 1.85 because that means the freeze starts late enough to not
affect its inclusion anyway ;)

> Our offer to help with any issues that arise still stands. Please let us
> know if there's anything we can do to help Trixie ship with Rust 1.85
> and the Rust 2024 edition. We have various developers (e.g. folks
> working on Rust in the Linux kernel) asking us and crossing their
> fingers that Debian stable will work for their development for a while.

Thanks! I'd also very much like 1.85 to be included in Trixie myself,
but it's not my call. Providing it via backports as plan B if it doesn't
make the cut should be fairly easy, especially if 1.84 is in Trixie.

Fabian