Re: Rust and Q-branching

[Havard Eidnes <he%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

>>> Are you saying that what is right now in wip/rust is, more or
>>> less exactly, something you believe is likely safe to update
>>> lang/rust?  In other words, is testing wip/rust valid in terms
>>> of checking the proposed update?
>>
>> I've tested that I get a working firefox out of using what's in
>> wip/rust right now on amd64-current with -current pkgsrc, so in
>> that sense "yes".
>
> Thanks.  I realize we might find troubles, and was trying to ask if it
> you think we are ready to just test and then update.

This actually touches on this quesition: what should be the
criterion for deciding that a rust update is "safe"?  That's not
at all clear to me.

Obviously, cutting a pkgsrc branch where the build of www/firefox
is broken because of rust on NetBSD/amd64 9.x would be very bad.
Probably the same can be said for NetBSD/i386 9.x, though perhaps
less so, particularly if the problem isn't actually caused by
rust.

However, we build rust on more ports/targets which either has
never managed to build firefox (looking at macppc and probably
armv7(?)), or where it's continually troublesome for mostly other
reasons (sparc64).  Obviously "firefox builds" can't be a
criterion for those ports/targets.

Borderline is probably NetBSD/i386 8.0 -- my recent attempts
revealed a needed fix for multimedia/dav1d (thanks, Nia!), and a
dubious construct trying to use a clang-specific option with gcc
for NetBSD 8.* in mozilla-common.mk.  These obviously have
nothing to do with rust itself, but are indicative that this
particular port/OS-version combination doesn't get sufficiently
excercised.

Borderline is perhaps also NetBSD/aarch64(?) -- do we have
firefox building and working on that?  The build resources I have
available are however inadequate to build www/firefox on aarch64
in acceptable time, it's barely sufficient to test-build rust,
"natively".

A large user of rust is of course the rust compiler itself.  If
there is a fundamental fallout for one of the ports/targets we
build for which would break firefox, would not that also prevent
the build of rust itself?

Regards,

- Håvard