Support for debian releases

bananagold00 · December 12, 2025, 3:37pm

What is the problem you are having with rclone?

Debian is using a severely outdated version of rclone and has recently removed rclone from testing. This is due to issues with dependencies that block new releases of rclone. However the related issues look like it could be addressed easily by using the required build flags that skip the currently outdated dependencies. If such flags exist, I can't find them however. Since rclone may be removed from future Debian releases if the package is not fixed in testing, I am hoping that someone with better knowledge of the rclone code may be willing to help out with the issue so we may keep the package in mainstream distributions.

Bugtracker:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1106640

Run the command 'rclone version' and share the full output of the command.

rclone v1.60.1-DEV
os/version: debian 13.2 (64 bit)
os/kernel: 6.12.57+deb13-amd64 (x86_64)
os/type: linux
os/arch: amd64
go/version: go1.23.2
go/linking: dynamic
go/tags: none

Animosity022 · December 12, 2025, 3:53pm

RClone doesn’t directly support any repos so you’d have to ask the maintainer of the package to update it.

Recommended install is from the rclone website.

Install

bananagold00 · December 12, 2025, 4:15pm

I am aware, but I thought you may want to know about it and possibly help out before rclone vanishes from a majority of all linux distros.

Animosity022 · December 12, 2025, 4:18pm

That would be good as the versions are not maintained and often confuse end users as they install old / dated versions.

If I had a nickel for every time I said remove the repo version and install from rclone..

ncw · December 12, 2025, 4:20pm

The recommeded way of skipping dependencies is to comment them out (or remove the line) here (assuming it is a backend)

github.com/rclone/rclone

backend/all/all.go

master

// Package all imports all the backends
package all

import (
	// Active file systems
	_ "github.com/rclone/rclone/backend/alias"
	_ "github.com/rclone/rclone/backend/archive"
	_ "github.com/rclone/rclone/backend/azureblob"
	_ "github.com/rclone/rclone/backend/azurefiles"
	_ "github.com/rclone/rclone/backend/b2"
	_ "github.com/rclone/rclone/backend/box"
	_ "github.com/rclone/rclone/backend/cache"
	_ "github.com/rclone/rclone/backend/chunker"
	_ "github.com/rclone/rclone/backend/cloudinary"
	_ "github.com/rclone/rclone/backend/combine"
	_ "github.com/rclone/rclone/backend/compress"
	_ "github.com/rclone/rclone/backend/crypt"
	_ "github.com/rclone/rclone/backend/doi"
	_ "github.com/rclone/rclone/backend/drive"
	_ "github.com/rclone/rclone/backend/dropbox"

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Running go mod tidy would then remove the dependency from go.mod which would remove the problematic dependency (whatever that is - I don't know!)

All this is within the capabilities of the debian source patching system I believe.

bananagold00 · December 12, 2025, 4:44pm

@ncw Thank you, I will document that in the issue to hopefully allow for faster updates

bananagold00 · December 12, 2025, 4:46pm

That is horrible advise.
As much as I agree with the general issue of stable distro packages being outdated with the risk of missing security patches, installing software manually like that basically guarantees it wont be updated by most users.

Animosity022 · December 12, 2025, 4:47pm

The whole point of Debian is not fast updates. It sticks with older / stable packages (albeit not that old as that version).

That works for many things, but is pretty bad for rclone it’s constantly updating and changing.