How to build Rust packages

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludovic.courtes@inria.fr>]

Hello,

Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il> skribis:

> I still have a copy of the code on my machine but unfortunately it no
> longer builds due to the constant churn of rust packages.
>
> One thing I remember explicitly about it was that building end packages
> was faster than the current method, and that was before taking into
> account reusing build artifacts.
>
> https://notabug.org/maximed/cargoless-rust-experiments

Neat.

> Another idea which I'm not in love with is what Debian does. They grab
> all of the sources into one build environment and then build everything.
> It simplifies the dependency management of the sources but for us it
> would make it so that we can't touch anything in rust without causing a
> full rebuild of everything.

I believe this is also what Nixpkgs does, as discussed in this thread:

  https://toot.aquilenet.fr/@civodul/113532478383900515

I’m not a fan either.  But I think one of the main criteria here should
be long-term maintainability, which is influenced by internal design
issues and by how we design our relation with the external packaging
tool.

By internal issues I mean things like #:cargo-inputs instead of regular
inputs, which makes the whole thing hard to maintain and causes
friction.  (See <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/53127>.)

As for the relation with Cargo and crates.io, the question is should we
map packages one-to-one?  Is it worth it?  If the answer is yes, do we
have the tools to maintain it in the long run.

Ludo’.