[Pkg-rust-maintainers] Some rust packages would love to be prioritized

[Wolfgang Silbermayr]

Dear FTP-Masters,

I know you are under a constant high workload recently, so I'm not very
keen to put more work on your shoulders. Unfortunately in the
debian-rust team, we have a situation that requires some support from
your side.

I try to untangle the problems we have with getting some of our packages
to migrate to testing. In the current situation, this leads to three
packages that are currently in the NEW queue, which block these
migrations (I hope this is an exhaustive list, but I wouldn't be
surprised if we found some more after these are accepted):

* rust-compiler-builtins
* rust-sval-derive
* rust-sval

The compiler-builtins package has been rejected before due to some
unclear license information. It has since been reviewed and documented
in the copyright file by members of the debian-rust team, with pointers
to the discussion in the upstream project added. These are *real* new
source packages being uploaded the first time (in opposite to the case
we sometimes have when a source package adds a new bin package).

It would be a huge help for the rust ecosystem inside debian to get
these packages accepted. Please let us know if there is something to be
done from our side, we're eager to clarify any obscurity.

Rationale for why these packages play such an important role:
Within the crates ecosystem (crate = rust library), there is a
combination of three crates at a very central location (proc-macro2,
quote, syn). All three of them were released in version 1.0, and after
that most rdeps got updated to that version. Due to several problems
caused by the missing packages as mentioned above, the migration fails
in migration phase 2 [0].

The release team started to worry about our packages being stuck in
unstable for such a long period of time, which is why they approached us
by mail [1] and in person at pre-FOSDEM MiniDebCamp to know that we are
working on the problems. I also assume that this plays into the
motivation of the latest release team policy update [2].

Best regards and thanks for your support,
Wolfgang.

--

[0]
https://release.debian.org/doc/britney/short-intro-to-migrations.html#migration-phase-2-installability-regression-testing
[1]
https://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/pkg-rust-maintainers/2020-February/009811.html
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2020/02/msg00005.html