I am a big fan of rust and think it's a natural fit for linux into the future. What isn't a natural fit is the npm tier dependency sprawl situation.

I really do think we need to listen to what distro maintainers are telling us, because they are the ones who understand how the rubber hits the road when it comes to maintaining and supporting software long term.

@hailey the biggest counterargument to the distro mode of software delivery that I know is that it's not uncommon for distro maintainers to just break packages, or to be hostile to upstream efforts--I've been told to not bother maintaining a debian/ because the first step in Debian is to `rm -rf` it

since if they break it, it's on me to fix it, why would I want them to package it?

@whitequark @hailey I had been there many years ago, confused about why shouldn't I keep debian/ dir upstream even though I was the one packaging my own thing in Debian. Only after getting more familiar with how things work I realized it makes perfect sense given the Debian's processes. I don't think it's fair to characterize it as "hostile".

It may still be valuable to maintain debian/ upstream though, but distinct from the distro packaging (usually for CI or for self-compiled dev builds).