Re: Versioning rust (firefox91 again)

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

On Sun, Jul 16, 2023 at 10:16:57AM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
> pin <voidpin%protonmail.com@localhost> writes:
[..]
> > As a maintainer for the majority of the Rust (with exception to
> > lang/rust) packages in tree, I don't like the idea of versioning Rust.
> > The extra maintenance burden is simply not what I wish for.
> 
> Sure, but the real issue is the way rust and rust-using packages conduct
> themselves, and the question is how and how much to work around that.

I agree with Greg here - rust is a very nice language and research project.
But as an implementation language it (currently) is a total nightmare.

The extra maintenance burden you talk about comes from engineering
decisions by various rust-using upstreams to depend on feature only
added in recent versions, combined with incompatible changes or
stricter checks in the core rust language.

Things will get better once the language stabilizes, or even gets
standartizized. But as we have seen with the recent C and C++ std
versions discussion, non-dead languages always are able to introduce
some kind of versioning pain in the real world.

Martin