Re: [PROPOSAL] Builder, a build system integration for Emacs

[Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org>]

>
> Just to remind people, Cargo is not a model we should follow. From what 
> I'm told, it is not merely a program to run locally, like Make or ld, 
> but a sort of server.
>
> I think that means it leads people to do their building in someone 
> else's server, rather than on your own computer.  For moral reasons, 
> that is not good.
>
> ISTR that Cargo has a catalog of libraries, some of them nonfree, and 
> that this makes it hard to build a Rust package and ensure no nonfree 
> library is used.
>
> If I'm mistaken about any of this, please let me know. In any case, we 
> should make sure that whatever WE recommend does not have these 
> problems.
>

You are mistaken.

Cargo is a program that runs locally, not a server.  It works like make, 
except that it may communicate with the crates.io repository, to fetch a 
copy of the source code (and the license) of the libraries you need to 
build a given Rust program, and that are not yet available locally.

The Rust compiler invoked by Cargo also runs locally, it does not build 
Rust programs on someone else's server.

There are currently 115402 available libraries in the crates.io 
repository, and out of these the vast majority (at least 110000) use free 
software licenses.

In any case, it is very easy to ensure that no non-free library are used 
when (or before) building a Rust program: just type "cargo tree -f '{p}: 
{l}'" to recursively display the licenses of all dependencies of the 
program.