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

[Brian Anderson]

On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 3:48 AM, Mike Hommey <mh at glandium.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 04:17:57AM +0000, Angus Lees wrote:
> > Now: if we're updating ESR firefox and that requires newer rustc, then
> > we'll need to distribute that newer rustc in the same way as any other
> new
> > build-deps required by the new ESR version.  That's fine and normal (...)
>
> Except it has technical challenges.
>
> - Timing-wise we're kind of lucky, because by the time an ESR requires
>   rustc, Debian stable will have shipped a rustc compiler.
>
> BUT
>
> - Debian oldstable (today's stable), which will likely still be supported,
>   won't have one. Which means either dropping support for a modern web
>   browser in oldstable, or bootstrapping rustc in oldstable.
>
> - 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)
>
> - By the time ESR requires rustc, the rustc version it requires will
>   need a version of LLVM very much more recent than the one in Debian
>   stable. Which means backporting a new version of LLVM as well. (and
>   the same again a year later, when the ESR version bumps)
>
> Now, to add fun to the mix, like there wasn't enough:
>
> - By the time ESR requires rustc, it will also require rust-bindgen.
>   Which in turn requires libclang.
>
> 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.
>
> Or not ship Firefox at all, and "rely" on snap, flatpak, etc. or on
> people using "testing".
>


Oh, I missed this suggestion before but it actually seems like this
situation is the poster-child for the snap/flatpak use-case. What's the
story for those in Debian? Since we have basically one year to solve this
problem, is there any chance we can come up with a working flatpak package
in that time that will work for Debian, and possibly other distros?


>
> Mike
>
> PS: I'm almost not joking.
>
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