Re: Packaging rust-analyzer is not necessary.

[Maxime Devos <maximedevos@telenet.be>]

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Paul Alesius schreef op vr 25-03-2022 om 09:05 [+0100]:
> I've tried to produce a patch for the latest version, and it has
> probably hundreds of dependencies that need to be updated.

Even if you didn't succeed at updating _all_ dependencies, if you
have patches for some of them, please send them.  It will help people
in the future with updating rust-analyzer or other rust packages.

And is it necessary to update _all_ dependencies?  For comparison,
graphical applications usually compile just fine even if gtk+ or glibc
are somewhat old.

> In addition to that, rust-analyzer is under heavy development and
> there is a release every month. Many people will want to use the
> nightly version too.

For many people, a vaguely recent-ish version would be sufficient.  At
least, that's the case for C, GCC and Clang.

> As long as there is rust and rust-cargo in Guix, then rust-analyzer
> can be easily compiled and installed from git with "cargo xtask
> install --server" using the rust-cargo system.
> 
> I'd suggest that a Guix package for rust-analyzer is not needed,
> especially due to the excessive time required to update its package
> definition and all of the vendored dependency crates,

What is the point of a distribution if it not distributing packages?
Removing a package for being ~two months old and pointing users to
Rust's equivalent of "curl ... | bash -" instead seems a disservice to
users to me.

If I just do ‘cargo xtask install --server", how do I know if it isn't
bundling anything or containing malware?  Modifying the source code
seems also non-trivial, compared to Guix where one can do things like
--with-patch.  What about statelessness, reproducibility, time-
machine, the SWH fallback and sharing substitutes on the local network?

It might be possible to do "cargo xtask install --server", but many
advantages of Guix would be lost.

> and focus should instead be on rust and rust-cargo.

Indeed, e.g. it would be nice to figure out how to eliminate #:skip-
build?, replace #:cargo-inputs by regular inputs, figure out how to
stop having to package multiple versions of the same package.

Greetings,
Maxime.

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