Re: How to build Rust packages

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

Hello,

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

> I don't want to go and parse Cargo.lock, automagically generate packages
> based on that, and then download those as cargo-inputs for packages. Not
> only does that potentially pull in old versions of libraries which may
> have necessary updates or patches, it doesn't check them for license
> data or vendored C libraries.

Yes, that makes sense to me.  A corollary is probably that Guix itself
should only focus on a subset of available Crates, with a line drawn
somewhere.

This needs to be spelled out so contributors and users know what to
expect.

> I am jealous of the cran updater and all the work Rekado has put into
> making it work well, and I know I need to actually fix a bunch of stuff
> with the crates.  An updater and also the etc/committer.scm file.  There
> are too many crates to actually package them all, so that wouldn't be
> something workable to automatically package all of them.
>
> I have a script that goes through the crates and lists how many
> dependencies there are per file, and I have used it in the past to
> remove unused crates.  I have also come back and added them back in when
> something else needed them.

The problem is that currently tools that work for the rest of Guix don’t
work for Crate packages.

There’s the proposal at <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/53127>, there’s
also antioxydant, and there’s your script and other tools people might
have.  I think this needs to be consolidated so that things remain under
control.

Ludo’.