There are many high profile DDs who work or have worked for Canonical who are emphatically not the inverse — Canonical employees who are part of the Debian org.
The conclusion you drew is perfectly reasonable but I’m not sure it is correct, especially when in comparison Canonical is the newcomer. It could even be seen to impugn their integrity.
If you look at the article, it seems like the hard dependency on Rust is being added for parsing functionality that only Canonical uses:
> David Kalnischkies, who is also a major contributor to APT, suggested that if the goal is to reduce bugs, it would be better to remove the code that is used to parse the .deb, .ar, and .tar formats that Klode mentioned from APT entirely. It is only needed for two tools, apt-ftparchive and apt-extracttemplates, he said, and the only ""serious usage"" of apt-ftparchive was by Klode's employer, Canonical, for its Launchpad software-collaboration platform. If those were taken out of the main APT code base, then it would not matter whether they were written in Rust, Python, or another language, since the tools are not directly necessary for any given port.
Mmm, apt-ftparchive is pretty useful for cooking up repos for "in-house" distros (which we certainly thought was serious...) but those tools are already a separate binary package (apt-utils) so factoring them out at the source level wouldn't be particularly troublesome. (I was going to add that there are also nicer tools that have turned up in the last 10 years but the couple of examples I looked at depend on apt-utils, oops)
I know you can make configure-time decisions based on the architecture and ship a leaner apt-utils on a legacy platform, but it's not as obvious as "oh yeah that thing is fully auxiliary and in a totally different codebase".
I understand, but the comment to which I was replying implied that this keeps happening, and in general. That’s not fair to the N-1 other DDs who aren’t the subject of this LWN article (which I read!)
The conclusion you drew is perfectly reasonable but I’m not sure it is correct, especially when in comparison Canonical is the newcomer. It could even be seen to impugn their integrity.