Re: Removal of firefox115 and firefox128

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Havard Eidnes <he%NetBSD.org@localhost> writes:

> I realize that this is quite different from dealing with an age-old
> language (C) which has been through international standardization in
> multiple rounds, and which through its actions expresses a vastly
> different mindset about backward compatibility.  It's ... "different"...

What it's different from is valuing stability.

It's a major bug in the rust world that there is only one
implementation, and that anybody thinks it's ok to require a previous
version for anything, especially the compiler itself.

Besides the stabilty issues, it's also a massive fail for reproducible
builds.

It's not about C being old, but about a perspective that the language
and the compiler are not the same thing.  The way the rust community
behaves, it would be almost impossible for someone to create a second
implementation.

Yes, python is like this too, but python has shown some sanity in not
having disruptive changes to the same extent.  The written-in-python
programs that are troubled (because they aren't really maintained)
wouldn't stand a chance in the rust world.

But it is the world in which we live in, so the question is how to deal
with it.  I think that's some combination of:

  - attempt to land rust updates early in the quarter, rather than it
    being an emergency at the end.  I know that's work.

  - be prepared to give up on marginal arches for rust, and concentrate
    on amd64, aarch64, i386, earmv7hf-el, and consider having a working
    rust-bin good enough for the 32-bit arches

  - think hard about verisoning rust, so we have multiple versions all
    the time.  Don't worry that some programs won't work with the newest
    version available on some arch.  Just let people deal as best as
    they can.  This is a decision to not let difficult arches hold back
    the rest, and if there is willingness to fix the hard ones great,
    and if not they'll lose the ability to compile some programs.


I'm finding that things used by Home Assistant want bleeding edge rust.
So far I was able to pull rust-bin from wip onto my 2025Q4 system and be
ok, but things don't feel stable.  For this I only care about amd64
today, maybe aarch64, and some day in the glorious future risc-v.