As many of you know, the Rust compiler is self-hosting, so Rust is required to
build Rust.
The problem is that the Rust binaries provided by upstream only work on macOS
10.9 and above.
To get around this, there is a rust-bootstrap port that build Rust binaries on
10.9+ intended to build Rust on previous macOS version.
Currently, these binaries are stored on using my personal GitHub account.
So the entire upgrade process is essentially:
1) Update the version in rust-bootstrap.
2) Build Rust binaries on a 10.9 VM.
3) Upload Rust binaries to GitHub account.
4) On older machines, use MacPorts Rust binaries to build Rust.
On newer machines, us the upstream provides binaries to build Rust.
This is far from ideal, but it has allowed us to get Rust working back to 10.5
(both i386 and x86_64).
This entire procedure may be modified, and there are a few suggestions on the
mailing list
(https://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2022-December/thread.html#44855).
However, until consensus is reached about major changes, it would be nice to
make some incremental improvements.
The easiest change: does anyone know of a better place to store the MacPorts
generated binaries?
More challenging: can anyone think of a way to automate the process of building
the MacPorts Rust binaries after rust-bootstrap is update?
-Marcus
