[Pkg-rust-maintainers] Packaging delta

[Dan Davison]

Thanks Sylvestre,

I'm not familiar with the process or principles involved in adjusting
the way a project specifies its dependencies to make it compatible
with Debian packaging, so apologies in advance for not understanding
things; feel free to point me to reading material!

Could you point me to examples of rust projects that are doing things
in the way you would like? Here are two projects I'm looking at:

bat
https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/blob/master/Cargo.toml
https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/rust-bat

ripgrep
https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/Cargo.toml
https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/rust-ripgrep

Delta uses dependabot in Github to automatically track and update to
latest releases of dependencies. Is this the right thing to do or not?
I think this is what bat does also (see
https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/pulls?q=is%3Apr+dependabot, although I
don't see any dependabot entries there from the last month so perhaps
bat stopped using dependabot?)

You mention libraries such as console and syntect. Both bat and delta
have the same entries in Cargo .toml for those libraries:

console = "0.12.0"

[dependencies.syntect]
version = "4.4.0"

I see that bat uses caret syntax for a couple of libraries, but that
in general dependencies in Cargo.toml list a specific version without
caret or tilde. delta and ripgrep don't use caret or tilde syntax in
Cargo.toml at all.

> I had a quick look and it requires a few things:
>
> * bytelines in the archive (I just uploaded in NEW)

I don't quite understand what I'm being asked to do here. An entry for
bytelines v2.2.2 is in Cargo. toml and Cargo.lock.

> * I uploaded some updates (ex: structopt) to match the version you are
> expecting
>
> * a bunch of crates already in Debian to be updated (ex: console,
> syntect, etc).
>
> Some of them requires new packages too. ex: terminal-size

I'm not sure if I understand everything you've said above and I don't
know what the implications are; sorry!

> If you want to see delta sooner in Debian, the best way would be to
> relax the deps to make sure it can be built using the packages in the current archive.

Like I mentioned above, could you point me to examples of rust
projects doing things how you would like? Also, any description of the
principles behind what I should be aiming to do and how I test that I
have done it correctly would be helpful.

Thanks very much,

Dan