Hi everyone, I am new here so please forgive my ignorance of previous efforts and any discussions leading up to rustpkg in it's current form. I also don't have extensive experience with rustpkg itself having arrived at time when the message was basically "don't use rustpkg, just use make". I hope I'm not out of line with my questions and opinions here.
Because I'm new and I'm very interested in the subject it would be tremendously useful for me to hear precisely what is so bad about rustpkg that its problems preclude any salvage or redesign. If we don't want to do this on the mailing list there could always be a "rustpkg postmortem" wiki page. It would also be helpful to know if those in favor of removal and those in favor of finishing it also agree on what exactly it should do. Has there been any concentrated review of the state of the art for other languages/toolkits/ecosystems? Is there any reason not to extend an existing solution? Gradle for example states that the entire goal of the project is to be the ultimate tool for any project and already has early support for building native projects in assembly, C, or C++. Why not add a toolkit plugin for rustc? I understand that it would be less than ideal to require a JVM to use the defacto Rust build and packaging tool but the point I'm trying to make is that if correcting and completing rustpkg isn't on the table, then where can we look for a head start into a solution that appeals to the most people? The rest of this email might be off-topic so feel free to ignore. I can always start a new thread. Was it ever the goal to have this tool be the entry point for peoples interaction with Rust? "Just download X to get started!" I seem to recall reading that there was once a "rust" as well as "rustc". Is cargo-lite.py referring to a previous effort as well? Could a project specify Rust version constraints and this tool fetches the most appropriate Rust binaries (or uses a set of configured Rust installations) for it's dependencies, using them to execute the build? (Having to manage a large codebase that requires multiple versions of GCC is an enormous headache for me. Rust doesn't seem to be on the same track at all here... but oh how I hope it never becomes the same problem.) Related to the question above, is the goal to have Rust itself packaged and distributed with this tool? In my experience, whatever solution is chosen needs to embrace configuration over convention. To me this means that convention is established through default configuration and for a majority of projects very little will be required to be productive with the tool. For shops or projects which need to orchestrate rather large and specific builds with assortments of dependencies that span platforms, it's wonderful to not have to travel outside the friendly confines of the official build and package management tool. I would say that this also adds confidence in a new technology to know that you won't be fighting the tools to make use of it. Chip On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 1:29 PM, Tim Chevalier <[email protected]>wrote: > rustpkg is definitely unfinished. It's not clear to me that what it > needs is to be destroyed, rather than finished. That is, there may > well be good reasons; I just haven't seen them so far in this thread. > The concrete points that a few people have made are ones to do with > unfinished pieces of rustpkg that are relatively well-delineated from > the entire system. > > I'm not trying to argue for keeping it, it just seems to me that for > the good of the project, the reasons why it couldn't be salvaged > should be documented somewhere. As the person who did most of the > work, but wasn't able to finish it because I left Mozilla, it's > surprising to me that the fact that rustpkg isn't finished is being > used as a reason to purge it entirely. Rust is, after all, not > finished yet -- as a whole -- but we're not throwing out the entire > language. > > Cheers, > Tim > > > On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 11:28 AM, Ian Daniher <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Lots of good points in this thread, but I wanted to request deprecation, > but > > not removal until a better alternative is documented and made available. > > Rustpkg works for my needs - I use it every day - but it definitely > needs > > some TLC. > > > > Thanks! > > -- > > Ian > > > > > > On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 11:46 AM, SiegeLord <[email protected]> wrote: > >> > >> 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. > >> > >> -SL > >> > >> _______________________________________________ > >> Rust-dev mailing list > >> [email protected] > >> https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Rust-dev mailing list > > [email protected] > > https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev > > > > > > -- > Tim Chevalier * http://catamorphism.org/ * Often in error, never in doubt > "If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed > it." > -- Zora Neale Hurston > _______________________________________________ > Rust-dev mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev >
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