[Pkg-rust-maintainers] Facilitating Firefox+Rust Linux distro packaging

[Sylvestre Ledru]

Le 30/08/2016 à 16:18, Henri Sivonen a écrit :
> 
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 1:48 PM, Mike Hommey <mh at glandium.org> wrote:
>> - By the time ESR requires rustc, it will require a very much more
>>   recent version of rustc than the one in Debian stable. Rustc currently
>>   only be compiled, at best, by the previous version. Which means either
>>   building every released version of rustc between the one shipped in
>>   Debian stable and the one required by ESR in sequence, or
>>   bootstrapping rustc from scratch. (and same again a year later, when
>>   the ESR version bumps)
> 
> This would be neatly solved by Debian stable updating both Firefox and
> rustc every six weeks like Debian stable updates our competitor
> Chromium. (This would nicely also eliminate the complication of people
> who want to write Rust code having to know to avoid from main and to
> go to backports or to rustup.rs instead.)
If we are talking about Firefox ESR, my expectation from my release manager pov
is that we will use the same version of the rust compiler for the whole cycle.
I don't want rust changing versions impacting a product that we want to be stable...

Once an ESR cycle ends (they are shorter than Debian stable), well, bumping the rust
dependency is going to be a pain because of the LLVM dependency...
This is the core of the issue...


>> At this point, I'm thinking we might as well have a separate archive for
>> Firefox only, that would autobuild the latest uploads of llvm, clang,
>> rustc and Firefox in a Debian stable build environment.
> 
> Building a dependency constellation of the latest (non-ESR) Firefox,
> rustc, cargo, llvm and libclang appears to solve the problems, so it
> seems like a reasonable solution. Why would it need to be in a
> separate archive, though? Chromium already updates every six weeks in
> main as opposed to a separate archive.
AFAIK, Chromium doesn't have a dependency like Rust.


> Old Ubuntu LTS seems to be able
> to package a newer GCC within their main archive in order to build
> non-ESR Firefox: http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise/gcc-mozilla .
Ubuntu is not Debian ;)

S