Debian Mandates Rust For Apt, Reshaping Ubuntu And Other Linux Distros

One of nan world’s oldest and most influential Linux distributions, Debian, has officially announced plans to restructure its improvement strategy by adopting Rust arsenic a halfway connection for system-level devices and early packages.

Julian Andres Klode, a long-time Debian developer and lead maintainer of nan Advanced Package Tool (APT), announced connected nan Debian developer database that, going forward, Rust will beryllium a required dependency for Debian’s basal APT package manager.

Specifically, Klode wrote that he planned “to present difficult Rust limitations and Rust codification into APT, nary earlier than May 2026. This extends astatine first to nan Rust compiler and modular library, and nan Sequoia ecosystem.”

Sequoia is simply a Debian task dedicated to creating a Rust implementation of OpenPGP.

Why? Klode explained, “Our codification to parse .deb, .ar, .tar, and nan HTTP signature verification codification would powerfully use from memory-safe languages and a stronger attack to portion testing.”

Impact connected Ubuntu, Mint, and Other Debian-Based Distros

APT is simply a halfway portion of Debian. Essentially each Linux distros based connected Debian, specified arsenic Ubuntu, Mint, and MX Linux, rely connected APT for package management. This intends that Rust codification is coming to each these distributions. That’s perfectly good pinch dome distribution architects. For example, Canonical has already incorporated Rust into Ubuntu sudo.

The rationale for these moves is to amended nan operating system’s information and stability. Rust’s memory-safe architecture blocks specified communal bugs arsenic buffer overflows, null pointer dereferences, and title conditions that person plagued C and C++ codebases for decades.

The Rationale: Enhancing Security and Stability

If you don’t for illustration it? Too bad. Klonde added, “If you support a larboard without a moving Rust toolchain, please guarantee it has 1 wrong nan adjacent six months, aliases sunset nan port.”

Ouch.

Some developers aren’t pleased. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz was disappointed to spot “such a confrontational approach” chosen to make nan APT announcement.

At nan aforesaid time, Bjørn Mork doubted that moving APT to Rust will beryllium each that helpful. “Rewriting codification intends adding caller bugs, whether aliases not nan devices drawback immoderate of them. But for fun, let’s presume that we yet extremity up pinch less superior bugs successful nan rewritten software. How agelong will that take? …  Are we expected to conscionable judge regressions for a while, because nan Rust reimplementations yet will drawback up pinch what we person today?”

Developer Community Reactions and Concerns

In a follow-up speech connected nan Debian developer list, Klonde shrugged. “Rust already is simply a difficult request for astir Debian ports, truthful this is hardly surprising.”

He besides pointed retired that only 4 older architectures — alpha, hppa, m68k, and sh4 — are not presently up to velocity pinch Rust. If nan developers for these platforms can’t supply Rust support, well, as  ebee_matteo put it connected Linux Weekly News (LWN), “It’s yet different motion that those architectures do not person capable developers to warrant nan continued effort to guarantee cross-platform compatibility. … This is not moreover a Rust/non-Rust debate. It is simply a ‘Does this larboard person capable developers and users astatine all?'”

Looking ahead, Debian’s adjacent awesome release, Forky, Debian 14, is slated to get successful mid-2026. It will characteristic deeper Rust integration not only successful APT but perchance successful different halfway utilities, build infrastructure and security-critical modules.

As for those Debian distributions that can’t, aliases won’t, adopt Rust, they tin ever travel nan way of nan Debian-based Linux distro antiX, which continues to build connected older Debian releases, specified arsenic Debian 12 “Bookworm,” to support 32-bit hardware.

Most developers will yet subordinate Klode successful embracing Rust. Really, it’s not that difficult a connection to learn, and it does make it easy to constitute memory-safe code. As personification who has bled complete C code, trying — and often failing — to make my programme memory-safe, I, for one, invited really Linux and its distributions are now integrating Rust.

Group Created pinch Sketch.