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   SuperDicq (superdicq@minidisc.tokyo)'s status on Thursday, 04-Jun-2026 07:55:06 JST SuperDicq

   in reply to

   • surely bazkie 👩🏼‍💻

   @bazkie@beige.party When a Debian release, in this case Trixie, gets marked as stable all the package versions get frozen.
   
   As long as you keep using Debian Trixie, the program rsync will never upgrade past 3.4.1. Debian Trixie's end of LTS is 2030, so you don't have to worry about it until then.
   
   After that or if you decide to upgrade away from Trixie before then, you can pin the old version of package in your /etc/apt/preferences.
   
   At some point you might run into the package becoming incompatible with dependencies that are available and then the old version of rsync you want to use might need some minor manual patching to get it up to date again.
   
   But personally I wouldn't worry about that. If the new version of rsync is really going to cause regressions and bugs I do not think Debian will want include the newer versions anyway. What is likely to happen is that someone will probably make a fork of rsync soon and maintain it properly.

   • Embed this notice
     surely bazkie 👩🏼‍💻 (bazkie@beige.party)'s status on Thursday, 04-Jun-2026 07:55:07 JST surely bazkie 👩🏼‍💻

     okay, some big debian questions; so I'm using rsync daily to backup all my important stuff (both locally and to offsite)

     my debian stable (trixie) has version 3.4.1, which is fine; but I don't want the newer, sloppified version..

     so I wondered:

     - can I tell my debian install to just keep this version forever? or will that break things sooner or later?

     (to everyone explaining how to hold a package, yes thanks but I know that; my question is more like "can I do that forever without things breaking". but I understand the answer must be no 😅 maybe the question was more out of desperation; that clearly isn't the way to go in the long run.. a real solution must come from the debian team then =>)

     - since debian tends to be pretty strict when it comes to stability (it's called debian stable after all), is there an active discussion going on, in the debian community, about how to deal with obviously sloppifying packages like rsync?

     will debian maybe freeze them at the last non-sloppified version too somehow, so I don't have to deal with that?

     surely, it can't be that obviously worse versions of packages go from debian experimental, through testing, to stable, right? 😬

     I'm rather curious/puzzled/anxious how debian will handle cases like this, since there's bound to be a ton of them before long.

     does anyone, someone more familiar with the debian community, have some insights on this process, and if this is being actively discussed? I really hope it is!

     because this is going to be a massive, make or break, problem before long - it kinda already is, at least for me, a random user, who is worried their backups might start breaking soon 😬

     btw. I understand I could switch from rsync to some forked version, and I probably will if the answer to my question is "no, there's little discussion, and they are going to let the sloppified packages trickle through the experimental => testing => stable chain"; but that only works around the problem for this specific package.

     I don't have time to find slopfree alternatives to all of these hundreds of tools that exist in a standard debian installation..

     or maybe, would debian at some point maybe switch to forked, non-sloppified versions of packages, and denote them the new defaults, and handle the upgrade in somewhat automated fashion?

     I remember how mariadb became kind of the new standard mysql, after oracle acquired that. but of course that only works if there is a big enough community of hobbyist programmers to maintain these unslopped forks - if only for security fixes; I'd be happy enough if everything just stays mostly fixed in functionally from this point in time on.

     questions, questions! sorry this got a bit long and winding. just worried about the future of linux. I'm sure we all are.

     #linux #debian