Re: More stability needed in our Rust packages, for IceCat 60

[Danny Milosavljevic <dannym@scratchpost.org>]

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Hi Mark,

On Fri, 21 Sep 2018 23:35:17 -0400
Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> wrote:

> It took my fastest laptop about 36 hours to build the chain of 5 rust
> compilers required to get to the latest Rust release, and to build
> IceCat.  By the time I had gotten IceCat built and tested, you had
> pushed a few more improvements to our Rust packages, rendering my
> testing obsolete.  I decided to push it anyway, since the IceCat update
> is a critical security update.

Yes, I agree that it was correct to do that.

> Since then, I started my fastest laptop building the new Rust compilers,
> and also generated an evaluation on Hydra to build the new IceCat.  Both
> of these build efforts are less than half through the Rust bootstrap,
> and now I see that I'll need to cancel these jobs and start again.
> 
> Of course, I'm extremely grateful for all of the work you are doing on
> this, but it has also become apparent to me that if our IceCat package
> is to be effectively usable, we'll need to drastically reduce the
> frequency with which our Rust compilers are modified on the master
> branch.
> 
> How would you feel about doing further Rust work on a separate branch,
> and periodically (maybe 2-4 times per month) merging the collected
> improvements into master?

I agree actually.  Rust is taking up way too much of my own build
capacity right now.  Even small changes have to be tested on at least
a few of the compilers, because Rust seems to change what settings one
can use regularily - and any of those could break master (and did before).

I've reverted the last commit mentioning "ar".  It's not strictly the
right fix to revert it, but it's the most stable version to have on
master.

I've also been talking to a new volunteer, so now is actually a good
time for oponeing a new branch.

I've now opened wip-rust and will be pushing it after some rust versions
built.

If anyone wants a simple way to contribute to getting Rust bootstrapped,
please provide some cpu time to help with compiling Rust :)

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