[Pkg-rust-maintainers] should core-arch and sleef-sys features be dropped from rust-packed-simd?

[Peter Michael Green]

rust-core-arch and rust-sleef-sys are both rc buggy.

In the case of rust-core-arch it appears that the code itself is still 
developed as part of
the rust standard library, but it no longer appears to be being released 
as a separate
crate on crates.io. Furthermore the description of it  on crates.io says

> Using |core::arch| via this crate requires nightly Rust, and it can 
> (and does) break often.

Which doesn't seem terribly suitable for a stable release to me. 
Especially as rustc
tends to get updated over the lifetime of a Debian stable release to 
support new
versions of firefox/thunderbird.

In the case of rust-sleef-sys, I have filed an upstream bug report at
https://github.com/gnzlbg/sleef-sys/issues/27, however indications are
that the upstream maintainer is mostly inactive. In particular in
https://github.com/rust-lang/packed_simd/issues/303 it is said
in reference to a request to update packed_simd on crates.io that
"the original maintainer is out of contact" and the maintainer of
packed_simd and sleef-sys crates on crates.io are the same. gnzlbg
does seem to have a small amount of activity on github though.

The reason these packages are not marked for autoremoval is that
packed-simd has optional dependencies on them which debcargo
converts to feature packages. The rust-packed-simd package is a key
package through the chain
rust-packed-simd->rust-rand->rust-tempfile->rust-cbindgen->firefox-esr

I would thus propose, dropping the core-arch feature from
rust-packed-simd and if there is no reponse from the upstream
maintainer of sleef-sys, doing the same for the sleef-sys
feature. Neither feature package has any reverse dependencies
in Debian.

Any thoughts/objections?

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