On 01/27/2014 11:53 PM, Jeremy Ong wrote:
I'm somewhat new to the Rust dev scene. Would anybody care to summarize roughly what the deficiencies are in the existing system in the interest of forward progress? It may help seed the discussion for the next effort as well.
I can only speak for myself, but here are some reasons why I abandoned rustpkg and switched to CMake.
Firstly, and overarchingly, it was the attitude of the project development with respect to issues. As a comparison, let me consider Rust the language. It is a pain to make my code pass the borrow check sometimes, the lifetimes are perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Rust. I put up with them however, because they solve a gigantic problem and are the keystone of Rust's safety-without-GC story. rustpkg also has many incredibly frustrating aspects, but they are there (in my opinion) arbitrarily and not as a solution to any real problem. When I hit them, I do not get the same sense of purposeful sacrifice I get with Rust's difficult points. Let me outline the specific issues I personally hit (I know of other ones, but I haven't encountered them personally).
Conflation of package id and source. That fact combined with the fact that to depend on some external package you have to write "extern mod = pkgid" meant that you needed to create bizarre directory structures to depend on locally developed packages (e.g. you'd have to put your locally developed project in a directory tree like so: github.com/SiegeLord/Project). This is not something I was going to do.
The package dependencies are written in the source file, which makes it onerous to switch between versions/forks. A simple package script would have solved it, but it wasn't present by design.
My repositories have multiple crates, and rustpkg is woefully under-equipped to handle that case. You cannot build them without dealing with pkg.rs, and using them from other projects seemed impossible too (the extern mod syntax wasn't equipped to handle multiple crates per package). This is particularly vexing when you have multiple example programs alongside your library. I was not going to split my repository up just because rustpkg wasn't designed to handle that case.
All of those points would be solved by having an explicit package description file/script which was THE overarching design non-goal of rustpkg. After that was made clear to me, I just ditched it and went to C++ style package "management" and a CMake build system.
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