Like It Or Not, Rust Is Coming To Debian's APT Package Manager

Rust has been making waves in the information technology space. Its memory safety guarantees and compile-time error checking offer clear advantages over C and C++.

The language eliminates entire classes of bugs. Buffer overflows, null pointer dereferences, and data races can't happen in safe Rust code. But not everyone is sold. Critics point to the steep learning curve and unnecessary complexity of certain aspects of it.

Despite criticism, major open source projects keep adopting it. The Linux kernel and Ubuntu have already made significant progress on this front. Now, Debian's APT package manager is set to join that growing list.

What's Happening: Julian Andres Klode, an APT maintainer, has announced plans to introduce hard Rust dependencies into APT starting May 2026.

The integration targets critical areas like parsing .deb, .ar, and tar files plus HTTP signature verification using Sequoia. Julian said these components "would strongly benefit from memory safe languages and a stronger approach to unit testing."

He also gave a firm message to maintainers of Debian ports:

If you maintain a port without a working Rust toolchain, please ensure it has one within the next 6 months, or sunset the port.

The reasoning is straightforward. Debian wants to move forward with modern tools rather than being held back by legacy architecture.

What to Expect: Debian ports running on CPU architectures without Rust compiler support have six months to add proper toolchains. If they can't meet this deadline, those ports will need to be discontinued. As a result, some obscure or legacy platforms may lose official support.

For most users on mainstream architectures like x86_64 and ARM, nothing changes. Your APT will simply become more secure and reliable under the hood.

If done right, this could significantly strengthen APT's security and code quality. However, Ubuntu's oxidation efforts offer a reality check. A recent bug in Rust-based coreutils breifly broke automatic updates in Ubuntu 25.10.

Via: Linuxiac

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It's FOSS NewsSourav Rudra