Unfortunately, one of the things that Debian is, is almost unable to manage packaging modern dependency trees. While more recent distributions like Guix can recursively import dependencies from a dozen programming languages’ package repositories, with a result that is generally acceptable to add to the distribution, Debian’s policies don’t make that very possible for a progam to accomplish. Perhaps some will use LLMs to do that. If they succeeed, Debian will become dependent on proprietary software for development, while still needing people in the loop, doing even less appealing scut-work.

See also his blog entry on concrete disadvantages of contributions of LLM-generated code, in this case in git-annex.

It is very interesting what Guix achieves.

I run Debian on all my home systems, increasingly with some Guix on top.

Yesterday, I was setting up an old X220 Thinkpad with Debian stable for a purpose of quick data entry in my living room. (My work Thinkpad can’t do that because due to some hardware problem, it crashes when one tries to suspend it and closes the lid). I wanted to have Taskwarrior on it, which I want to sync with the Taskwarrior instance on my Gemini PDA, for things like shopping lists. The PDA runs Sailfish OS, which contains Taskwarrior.Turns out it is Taskwarrior 3, which has a new sync protocol. Debian Trixie still has Taskwarrior 2 which is not compatible.

The easiest solution? Installing Guix as package manager and “guix install taskwarrior”.

And Guix also has a current Rust compiler and cargo build tool, which is nice for building and running personal tools,and things like jujutsu.

Still, Debian is the base, and the contributions of Joey Hess and the other maintainers are invaluable.