[Pkg-rust-maintainers] state of the rust ecosystem (and particularly rust-cbindgen) in Debian (was: Requesting backport of cbindgen > 0.10.0 to buster)

[Ximin Luo]

peter green:
> On 10/04/2020 17:47, peter green wrote:
>>
>> (note: these are my observations as a maintainer of a derivative)
>>
>>> The rust ecosystem in Debian
>>> recently had (and I expect still has) trouble to properly migrate to
>>> testing 
>> Indeed there are still issues, most notablly IMO that firefox-esr's build-dependencies have been unsatisfiable in testing for over 7 months because rust-cbindgen has not been able to migrate to testing.
> 
> Update:
> 
> Sylvestre invited me into the rust team and him and I have been plugging away at this. The issues mentioned in my original mail have been dealt with.
> 
> Unfortunately new issues do seem to pop up, for example sometimes tests that were being skipped because of dependency issues before start to run. Also some packages were uploaded (crossbeam-util and goblin) that broke revese-dependencies. I have been dealing with these as I spot them.
> 
> Can I ask that until we get this lot migrated to testing that people are careful about uploading packages that involve a semver break.
> 

Please read the packaging tips in README of debcargo-conf.git in full. We are in fact aware of all of these issues, it's just a lack of time dealing with it all.

In particular dev/list-rdeps.sh is a relatively new script from a few months ago that will take big steps to preventing some of the previous issues, which in fact were problems originally introduced between July and November of last year, and due to the slow process in Debian still have aftereffects to today.

There is also a dev/rust-regressions.sh that attempts to guess the reason behind autopkgtest failures. Perhaps you can help improve the script. There are also inherent problems with the Debian CI testing infrastructure which make it mismatch test-dependencies across Debian test suites, this is still not resolved. But luckily (back in January) it only affected two packages. The rust-regressions.sh script will detect this type of failure as well.

There is nothing philosophically different about the way Rust handles dependencies and Debian handles dependencies, there is just more volume of metadata. Abstract vague philosophical comments are useless and waste precious time. We have developed a lot of automated tooling to deal with the volume, the issues are all understood, and there is simply a bunch of fairly tedious packaging work that remains.

X

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