Re: what is the plan for rust?

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

Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost> writes on 6 October::

> I know it's early October but we will be talking about Q4 soon enough!

Today is the last day of early October :-)

> wip is now at 1.73 while pkgsrc is at 1.70.   Earlier I thought pkgsrc
> was going to be upgraded to 1.71 right after the branch, and then
> again.
>
> I do not know if we have a plan that one can regenerate bootstraps along
> the way, version by version, and I don't know if 1.N still requires
> 1.N-1.
>
> Do we have a plan?  What is it?  Why?

I heard offlist from one of the people working on rust, and we don't
seem to have a firm plan/norm.

Therefore for the good of Q4 and future I am making one and will
document it in lang/rust, perhaps in README.md because I don't want
people to try to keep the docs small to keep the Makefile small.  This
would be above and beyond comments normally expected.  Basically:

  pkgsrc will update to each minor version (1.x) of rust in sequence, to
  enable people to bisect if they have to, and to reduce pain towards a
  future, even if theoretical, get-well plan for perhaps reproducible
  and from-source build chains.  (It might be that a version is only in
  for a few days.)

  pkgsrc will in general update rust and rust-bin at the same time.

  There will be platforms where rust or rust-bin won't work, because
  forward progress and no lossage are obviously incompatible in
  practice, at least for now.  We (currently, will evolve) insist on
  x86, i386, aarch64, earmv7hf-el working, would really like to see
  sparc64 and earmvhf-el, and hope for powerpc, riscv64, mipsel.  See
    https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/distfiles/LOCAL_PORTS/rust/
  for status.

  We will attempt to document the bootstrap process such that people who
  are not rust experts but have the hardware (or have set up an
  emulator) can produce bootstrap kits and/or rust-bin distfiles.

  Probably, after we dig out of being behind, wip/rust should become
  wip/rust172 and wip/rust173, so that (without git history):
   - starting on the next can be decoupled from having hoisted the
      previous to pkgsrc proper      history
   - people can work on filling in binaries for one while the next is in
     progress

  Writing down the testing plan.  It might be that we are being overly
  paranoid as I haven't been seeing reports of "firefox builds but
  doesn't run right" (in a rust-related kind of way :-) for a while.  In
  the end people who care about minority platforms are going to have to
  keep up.  (Really they should get everything upstream and have them be
  officially supported but I realize that's unlikley.)

Therefore, I have asked pin@ to land 1.71.1 in pkgsrc.