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

[Strano, Luis]

Folks,

Sorry for taking long to reply, but I also believe I was added by mistake to this thread. I still own the LLVM launchpad project and used to maintain an updated PPA there a long time ago, but I have not worked on this since (and no one contacted me about stepping in).

Best regards,
Luis Strano


From: Brian Anderson <banderson at mozilla.com<mailto:banderson at mozilla.com>>
Date: Tuesday, August 30, 2016 at 5:18 PM
To: Sylvestre Ledru <s at mozilla.com<mailto:s at mozilla.com>>
Cc: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen at mozilla.com<mailto:hsivonen at mozilla.com>>, Ximin Luo <infinity0 at debian.org<mailto:infinity0 at debian.org>>, Mike Hommey <mh at glandium.org<mailto:mh at glandium.org>>, Angus Lees <gus at debian.org<mailto:gus at debian.org>>, "pkg-mozilla-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org<mailto:pkg-mozilla-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org>" <pkg-mozilla-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org<mailto:pkg-mozilla-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org>>, "pkg-rust-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org<mailto:pkg-rust-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org>" <pkg-rust-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org<mailto:pkg-rust-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org>>, Chris Coulson <chrisccoulson at ubuntu.com<mailto:chrisccoulson at ubuntu.com>>, Hans Jørgen Hoel <hansjorg at gmail.com<mailto:hansjorg at gmail.com>>, Luis Strano <luis.strano at intel.com<mailto:luis.strano at intel.com>>, Lars Bergstrom <larsberg at mozilla.com<mailto:larsberg at mozilla.com>>, "Crichton, Alexander" <acrichton at mozilla.com<mailto:acrichton at mozilla.com>>, Jonathan Turner <jturner at mozilla.com<mailto:jturner at mozilla.com>>, Gregory Szorc <gps at mozilla.com<mailto:gps at mozilla.com>>, Ted Mielczarek <ted at mozilla.com<mailto:ted at mozilla.com>>, Luca BRUNO <lucab at debian.org<mailto:lucab at debian.org>>, "Jones, Anthony" <ajones at mozilla.com<mailto:ajones at mozilla.com>>
Subject: Re: Facilitating Firefox+Rust Linux distro packaging



On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 7:27 AM, Sylvestre Ledru <s at mozilla.com<mailto:s at mozilla.com>> wrote:
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<mailto: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<http://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...

Is this implying that upgrading the Rust package alongside the new Firefox ESR, within the Debian stable cycle, is doable? It's only upgrading the LLVM dependency that is going to be problematic (and presumably libclang)?

If I understand how this is looking to play out, late 2017 Debian stable will need to upgrade to its first Firefox ESR that depends on Rust. At that time it will need to introduce rustc and cargo packages, that have dependencies on _some version of LLVM_; it's also likely that at that time m-c will depend on or vendor rust-bindgen and in turn creating a libclang dependency. Is that right? Does introducing the rustc and cargo packages mid-cycle pose a problem? If not, is figuring out how to accommodate the Debian-stable LLVM and libclang the only major problem?

I might suggest we can solve the problem with LLVM by promising compatibility with whatever LLVM Debian stable lands on, but I know LLVM has some major IR changes coming that are likely to make that difficult.

With Thunderbird taking on a Rust dependency does that impact Debian's anti-bundling policies? Do Thunderbird and Firefox share a gecko package?





>> 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.

Mike, does "separate archive" mean people would need to get their Firefox debs from an unofficial source? Is this scheme problematic either technically or politically?

>
> 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.

Can you expand on what you mean by "like Rust"? Is it that Rust is large, that it's a compiler? How does the 6-week Chromium update scheme work with their deps - are they bundled or do they have their own "constellation" of packages only used by Chromium?



> 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

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-rust-maintainers/attachments/20160830/be9c4a59/attachment-0001.html>