On 02/01/2016 18:44, Jookia wrote: > On Sat, Jan 02, 2016 at 10:12:50PM +1100, stewart mackenzie wrote: >> I'm aware that Rust can replace Perl via FFI it's the added deps that >> concern me > > Could you elaborate on this? I've seen a lot of talk about dependencies but > what > exactly is the problem? Portability sounds like a genuine concern, but you can > still be portable with a lot of dependencies as long as they're portable.
If I want to compile and run Nix on a non-NixOS distribution, I would need to first install Rust, preferably from that distro's packages. There's a risk that the distro doesn't provide Rust at all. There's a risk that if the distro does provide Rust, then it isn't the right version for Nix. In either of those cases, I would then first need to install Rust without the help of *any* package manager. That's a serious obstacle for new users to getting started with Nix. That's a potentially serious obstacle for existing users to converting other systems to Nix/NixOS as well. The current dependencies (bzip2, curl, sqlite, perl) could already be a small problem for the same reason, but at least it is a list of very stable software that's widely available in pretty much all package repositories. Rust is not yet in the same category, as far as I know. Cheers, Harald van Dijk _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
