Re: Rust and Q-branching

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‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

On Tuesday, September 7th, 2021 at 12:19 PM, Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost> wrote:

> -   On 2021-09-03 at 13:10 BST, Greg Troxel wrote:
>
> > It is really unfortunate that the rust world thinks it is ok to depend
> > on really recent rust. 1.54.0 was only released 36 days ago. So
> > separately from our stability concerns about updates close to freeze, I
> > don't think it's a problem to defer those updates until after branching.
>
> I know I'm biased in favour of Rust, which may cloud my judgement, but I
> think it's important to realise that software in general is moving
> towards more frequent releases and a more aggressive expectation of
> things being up-to-date, and it's just something we're going to have to
> deal with or be left behind.
> Rust developers and users primarily use "rustup" to handle their
> toolchain, and will generally switch to the latest version with a simple
> "rustup update" on the same day it is released. When you're used to
> that workflow, it's unfortunate, but 36 days feels like an eternity.

True, upstream of some of the packages I maintain has set-up NetBSD builds
to verify it builds fine. They have reported the package builds with 1.54.0
when, I can't build it with 1.52.1.

But, I'm also biased in favour of Rust.


> In terms of Rust releases, other than having to produce the necessary
> bootstraps, this should not in theory affect any package builds. Rust
> has a very strict notion of "editions":
> https://doc.rust-lang.org/edition-guide/editions/index.html
> so if there is some software that builds ok on rust 1.N but not 1.N+1 or
> even 1.N+47 then that is a bug in that software, i.e. it hasn't
> correctly specified which edition it is targeting.

Also true.

> That of course doesn't excuse drive-by updates, and we should be as
> careful as possible, but it should mean we can be more confident that as
> long as Rust itself builds on all important platforms we should be good
> to go, at least compared to some other languages.
> Jonathan Perkin - Joyent, Inc. - www.joyent.com