Dear all, I thought I would let you know about the current status of Anki and its hopes of getting into Debian.
The upstream maintainers started 2020 by incorporating a Rust library into the package, which increased the complexity of the Debian maintenance process by an order of magnitude: it is now necessary to work with the Rust team to ensure that all the necessary crates are in sync, which is quite challenging! But the year has gotten even more challenging: they have now switched to using Bazel as their build system, and are also using a bunch of Node.js libraries (most notably TypeScript). Unfortunately, Bazel is only just in the process of being packaged for Debian, and Bazel's model is to download everything it needs from the internet. So Bazel will need some significant work, joint between the Debian team and upstream, to modify it to allow for local builds. This is not going to happen in time for the bullseye release, but it should happen at some point during the following release cycle (bullseye+1). So for the time being, we will have to stick with anki 2.1.15 in Debian. If you are deperate to use a newer version, upstream does provide pre-built binaries, or you can compile it yourself. Sorry to not have better news on this front. Best wishes, and happy new year, Julian
