[Pkg-rust-maintainers] Request to join the rust team

[Markus Wanner]

Hi,

I'm interested in Rust and would like to help getting this nice language
packaged for Debian. I'm a DM and aspiring DD.

While this may seem early, most of my efforts so far have gone into
packaging rust libraries required for building cargo. I'm focusing on
dynamic libraries (even if those aren't stable, yet) as I don't believe
in static linking.

Cargo has dependencies on about a dozen rust libraries that use cargo to
be built. In a way, we're facing another dependency cycle, there. My
approach is many-fold:

 * I hacked cargo to emit some of the required files for packaging a
   library for Debian (control, changelog, rules, .install) based on
   Cargo.toml - including Build-Deps.
 * I made it emit a Makefile with the appropriate rustc invocations to
   generate different variants of the library (dylib, rlib, staticlib).
   I imagine to extend this mechanism to allow the Makefile to create
   test as well as real binaries, invoke rustdoc, etc..
 * I patched debhelper to recognize that conglomerate of Cargo.toml and
   the cargo-generated Makefile, so that debian/rules can be minimal.
   (debian/rules essentially being a Makefile, this may seem strange at
   first. However, I wanted to keep the Makefile.cargo as generally
   usable as possible. So I thought it should feature the usual targets
   just like a Makefile created by autoconf for it to be generally
   useful, not just for Debian.)

This works to some extent. For some of the cargo dependencies and
certain versions of those few libraries (the ones that compile with
rustc as currently "shipped" by something close to rustc as in the NEW
queue).

I'd like to ..

 a) share my code (maybe on some git repo on alioth?)
 b) get feedback on my approach (and code)
 c) join the rust team and update a couple of wiki pages
    (the policy for rust packaging of libraries still mentions rustpkg
     rather than cargo, for example)
 d) help with packaging rustc and its standard library
 e) update my cargo patches to work with current rustc
 f) extend cargo further to be able to cope with system-provided
    libraries (I don't like it downloading stuff w/o asking and wasting
    time re-building)
 g) work with cargo upstream
 h) get this thing flying

As usual, there's more TODOs than ALREADY-DONEs, but hey, it's a start.
Built on top of your efforts on rustc.

Regards

Markus Wanner

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