[Pkg-rust-maintainers] Comments regarding rust-miow_0.3.1-1_amd64.changes

[Angus Lees]

On Fri, 3 Aug 2018 at 22:57 Chris Lamb <ftpmaster at ftp-master.debian.org>
wrote:

> Why is this called "miow"?  Something I/O for Windows?
>

Yes.

The original/popular low-level IO library (select/poll abstraction) for
Rust is called "mio" ("Metal I/O").  This is a Windows library along the
same theme.

Just anticipating your next question: Yes, the windows library is still
required in Debian/unix.  It's possible for dependencies to be conditional
on the target platform in cargo metadata, but this appears to be rarely
used in practice (for a variety of reasons).  Most libraries instead just
use conditional-compilation to compile down to no-ops on the wrong platform
(ie: onus on the library author), rather than conditional cargo
dependencies (ie: onus on the library consumer).

For Debian packaging, we _could_ go through and patch everything to use
conditional dependencies instead.  That's a non-trivial amount of work to
do and maintain, and in practice removes only a handful of Windows-specific
libraries across the entire set of Rust packages. Thus, it is not something
we've rushed to commit to - particularly at this bootstrapping stage.

 - Gus
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