[Pkg-rust-maintainers] Generating arch-specific dependencies to avoid patching winapi, core-foundation etc

[Ximin Luo]

Hi,

Currently we ignore (debcargo ignores) architecture-specific qualifications on dependencies, which is why we end up packaging things like winapi and core-foundation in Debian. The original reasoning was that this allows us to avoid patching many crates that depend on them, and also in future theoretically supports cross-compilation of crates.

However this is creating extra work for us, because some packages are stuck on older versions of winapi. We end up having to talk to upstream to ask them to upgrade, or if they don't want to then we have to backport a patch to use a newer versions, or write it ourselves.

We could work around this by adding architecture-specific qualifiers to the relevant dependencies. This would then be ignore for non-windows builds (i.e. everything) and in the future if Debian does support cross-compiling to windows via DEB_HOST_ARCH we can then packaging the missing dependencies.

For this to work, the Debian testing migration scripts have to be clever enough to ignore these dependencies (because no existing Debian architectures match the pattern). Otherwise we'll have to package those anyway. I'll ask on #debian-devel about that.

X

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