When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience? [LWN.net]

When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience?

Posted Jun 28, 2025 22:35 UTC (Sat) by mb (subscriber, #50428)
In reply to: When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience? by SLi
Parent article: Getting extensions to work with free-threaded Python

> Do you really think that an industry that prefers this to fixing the software to jump happily when you tell
> them "just upgrade the compiler"?

No.
Just don't upgrade *anything*.
It will keep working and compiling.

Expecting to be able to upgrade random A while avoiding upgrading fundamental B is beyond my understanding.

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When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience?

Posted Jun 28, 2025 22:47 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (6 responses)

> It will keep working and compiling.

I think North American Air Traffic Control would beg to differ. They can no longer find a reliable source of 5 1/4" floppy disks, I believe ...

Cheers,
wol

When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience?

Posted Jun 28, 2025 22:52 UTC (Sat) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (5 responses)

I was obviously talking about software.

When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience?

Posted Jun 30, 2025 10:39 UTC (Mon) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (4 responses)

Even with software achieving the state where you don't upgrade anything at all can be hard due to changes in your environment (e.g. systems you need to talk to change, legal requirements change, the hardware you run on changes because the old version is no longer available).

The really big flaw, however, is the idea that changing a few things is almost as good as not changing anything, especially when changing those few things results in a version that is much less tested than the latest upstream stable version of a piece of software (e.g. backporting just security fixes). All you get is a changed version, often changed by people with a lot less experience with the software, that is less tested and immediately sent to the people with the highest stability requirements as the first users to discover all the newly introduced bugs.

When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience?

Posted Jun 30, 2025 11:03 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (3 responses)

> The really big flaw, however, is the idea that changing a few things is almost as good as not changing anything, especially when changing those few things results in a version that is much less tested than the latest upstream stable version of a piece of software (e.g. backporting just security fixes).

You forget that (1) upstream's tests don't cover *your* code, (2) upstream may *intentionally* change how something behaves vs an older version, introducing a regression that upstreams do not consider a bug (this is the unfortunate norm for Python, for example), and (3) most upstreams don't have "stable" vs "unstable" distinction, freely mixing fixes for old problems in with new development.

RHEL covers all three situations -- they backport fixes to their own "stable" branches, run all upstream tests, and also have a comprehensive in-house test suite (often including [propritary] customer software) that includes looking for ABI/API changes. Actual RHEL customers pay a lot of money for this work because they find it valuable (And as an aside, everyone who uses CentOS, Alma, Rocky, or any of the zero-cost RHEL rebuilds also finds it quite valuable, but for some reason feel entitled to get it all for free..)

When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience?

Posted Jul 1, 2025 8:57 UTC (Tue) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (2 responses)

> Actual RHEL customers pay a lot of money for this work because they find it valuable

Because they find it valuable to have someone to blame, not because the actual work is valuable. RHEL is one of the most painful distros to use and administer out of all I have ever used and things break much more often than on e.g. Debian despite RHEL having a small fraction of the packages.

> And as an aside, everyone who uses CentOS, Alma, Rocky, or any of the zero-cost RHEL rebuilds also finds it quite valuable, but for some reason feel entitled to get it all for free

Mainly because they need to be compatible with RHEL for some requirement dictated externally (e.g. build some binary to run on RHEL, some driver is only developed for RHEL,...) not because those distros are easy to use or even particularly stable.

When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience?

Posted Jul 1, 2025 14:03 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> Because they find it valuable to have someone to blame, not because the actual work is valuable.

Make up your mind; either what they provide is valuable, or it's not.

Keep in mind Red Hat is bringing in about $6.5 billion in annual revenue; that works out to somewhere between 2.3 million and 32.5 million individual RHEL licenses (using the $200->$2800/yr fees they list on their web site).

> Mainly because they need to be compatible with RHEL for some requirement dictated externally (e.g. build some binary to run on RHEL, some driver is only developed for RHEL,...) not because those distros are easy to use or even particularly stable.

There you go redefining terms again. ISVs and end-users clearly find that multi-year supported "stable" target to be quite cost-effective, and definitely more so than the alternatives.

When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience?

Posted Jul 3, 2025 8:14 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Keep in mind Red Hat is bringing in about $6.5 billion in annual revenue; that works out to somewhere between 2.3 million and 32.5 million individual RHEL licenses (using the $200->$2800/yr fees they list on their web site).

Sure, but presumably a certain number of these licensees run RHEL not because they think RHEL and its policies are the bee's knees, but because they're really interested in running something else that requires them to have RHEL underneath it, so they don't really have a choice in the matter (and the “something else” is so expensive that the RHEL licenses disappear in the noise floor).