[Pkg-rust-maintainers] Bug#942898: Bug#942898: debcargo: reduce the impact of debcargo-built crates on the package index, and facilitate debian packaging of crates

[Ximin Luo]

Daniel Kahn Gillmor:
> 
> Proposed Solutions
> ------------------
> 
> AIUI, the FTP team thinks that debcargo could reduce the impact on the
> shared resource of the Packages index by adopting one or both of the
> tactics described below:
> 
>  0) reduce the number of "+feature" .debs produced by each crate,
>     perhaps by creating two base .debs for each package: one with no
>     "features" and one that bundles together all of the features that
>     are not mutually-exclusive.  Any features that are mutually
>     exclusive would still get their own separate "+feature" .deb.
> 

Detecting "mutually-exclusive" isn't straightforward as you'd have to detect the cycles we mentioned below. I can't be bothered writing this code, the cost-benefit tradeoff is not worth it.

>  1) drop version numbering from the Provides: entries for standard
>     packages -- this should reduce the number of Provides: by a
>     substantial fraction.  Given that crates are expected to hew to
>     semantic versioning, a generated version number range should be
>     sufficient to declare an API-compatible version dependency.
> 

This isn't possible due to #901827.

The solution that we're already doing (I'll refer to this as "solution A" for future reference) for exceptionally large crates like web-sys is to just patch out the unused features. This is by far the easiest option that cuts away most of the size, whilst retaining the other benefits of the current automation.

So I don't see anything additional to do on this topic.

X

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