[Pkg-rust-maintainers] Facilitating Firefox+Rust Linux distro packaging

[Florian Weimer]

* Sylvestre Ledru:

>> Thinking out of the box, could Mozilla provide an apt-gettable archive
>> for jessie and stretch which contains the official builds?  Then we
>> could stop shipping Firefox.  This is what we ordinarily would do when
>> faced with such challenges.

> Maybe but this means that stable users would remain on an old version without
> security updates if they don't update their source list.

There are ways to replace packages so that users notice and will to
make changes.  It's not going to be a smooth ride, but it's doable.
Particularly because it's a package which is almost exclusively used
interactively.

>> To be clear, I don't have anything against Rust at all.  I'm playing
>> with it right now, and it definitely shows great promise.  But the way
>> Firefox's upstream choices force our hands seems highly irregular.

> I think you misunderstood the situation. Mozilla is not forcing the
> hand of anyone here.

They use the huge popularity of one package (Firefox) to push
something else that is completely unrelated (Rust).  There is no way
we would include Rust in Debian stable based on its own merits at this
point.  Not because Rust is without merit—it's just not the way things
are done on the Debian side (although I have been a bit out of touch
with that lately).