On Thu, May 25, 2023 at 3:49 AM Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

>
> FWIW, I don't trust tools that "do all that for me".  When building a
> package that needs some prerequisite, I want to:
> [...]
>

This is laudable but also requires effort, sometimes non trivial effort;
witness the extra hoops required to get functional tree-sitter "support"
inside emacs. Cargo is a (fairly slight, actually) evolution of the
strategy I first saw back in the mid-90's with CPAN (the "Comprehensive
Perl Archive Network"), through CTAN (similar for TeX), ruby, python, etc.

I do agree that the default setup of cargo tends a little too much towards
DWIMishness for my taste, but it's not hard to turn that down AND it
removes many of the most annoying parts of library version management/hell.

In this particular case, unless I'm misreading, the OP is suggesting that a
generic "builder" layer could include cargo as one of the many build
management systems that is widely used to create (usually libre) software,
rather than suggesting it as a model that either Emacs or the FSF should
follow.

I hope that helps,
~Chad