Hailey @hailey@hails.org
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the massive issue I have with debian, despite it being my preferred server OS, is I have no idea how you’re actually meant to do anything with the platform beyond consuming it. I build my own packages for my infrastructure because it’s more robust than copying tarballs around, but it’s complicated enough that I have to rely on a third party tool (makedeb) to do it. And here an APT maintainer is claiming that apt-ftparchive sees no serious use outside of Canonical. How are you supposed to host a package repo then?? Inscrutable system lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1046841

a passage from the linked LWN article: David Kalnischkies, who is also a major contributor to APT, suggested that if the goal is to reduce bugs, it would be better to remove the code that is used to parse the .deb, .ar, and .tar formats that Klode mentioned from APT entirely. It is only needed for two tools, apt-ftparchive and apt-extracttemplates, he said, and the only "serious usage" of apt-ftparchive was by Klode's employer, Canonical, for its Launchpad software-collaboration platform. If those were taken out of the main APT code base, then it would not matter whether they were written in Rust, Python, or another language, since the tools are not directly necessary for any given port.
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