Re: Preferring c over rust

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

John Klos <john%ziaspace.com@localhost> writes:

> => Verifying reinstall for ../../lang/rust
> => Bootstrap dependency digest>=20010302: found digest-20190127
> ERROR: This package is not available for these platforms:
> NetBSD-8.99.42-alpha.
> ERROR: This package has set PKG_SKIP_REASON:
> ERROR: rust-1.34.2 is not available for NetBSD-8.99.42-alpha
> *** Error code 1
>
> Stop.
> make[1]: stopped in /usr/pkgsrc/lang/rust
> *** Error code 1
>
> Stop.
> make: stopped in /usr/pkgsrc/graphics/librsvg
> *** 'make replace' failed for package librsvg.
> *** Please read the errors listed above, fix the problem,
> *** then re-run pkg_rolling-replace to continue.

Basically, you should replace librsvg with librsvg-c, and there is no
easy support for that.  But marking everything that depends on librsvg
as unsafe_depends, and 'pkg_delete -f librsvg', and then pkg_rr will
likely work.

> The commit note says:
>
> This package now uses rust. The user-settable variable LIBRSVG_USE_RUST
> allows switching between this and the (obsolete) plain-C version
> in librsvg-c. It defaults to "yes" on platforms that lang/rust currently
> supports.

Yes, but it is only about librsvg as a dependency.

> As projects move to non-portable languages, should we consider keeping
> the latest / last version which is still portable? In this case, I
> think it just needs to be fixed to prefer c, but in general I wonder
> what others' thoughts are about this kind of thing.

There is a C version.  There is no support for having the main package
be the C version.  That seems to be a transition issue once.

We did discuss the notion of keeping a version in a portable language,
for this specific case, and the consensus was very much in favor of
doing so, and it's been done.  We did not discuss the general case, but
I don't see why any future similar situation should end up differently.

Perhaps you can file a bug with librsvg that it doesn't build on most
platforms (weighted by type, vs popularity) and see how that goes :-(