Re: [PATCH 13/13] docs: rust: quick-start: add section on Linux distributions

["Fabian Grünbichler" <debian@fabian.gruenbichler.email>]

On Fri, Jul 05, 2024 at 02:52:44PM GMT, Miguel Ojeda wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 5, 2024 at 8:47 AM Fabian Grünbichler
> <debian@fabian.gruenbichler.email> wrote:
> >
> > Debian (for building firefox and chromium), and uses a -web suffix for
> > that:
> >
> > https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/rustc-web
> 
> Like for Ubuntu's versioned ones, it seems not recent enough at the
> moment (i.e. for the current kernel), if I understand correctly.

yep.

> Also, it is a single version, i.e. 1.70, right? We didn't use that
> particular version in any old kernel version (we moved from 1.68.2 to
> 1.71.1 in commit 89eed1ab1161 ("rust: upgrade to Rust 1.71.1") back
> then). So I am not sure how useful it would be, but if you think it
> will be in the future, perhaps it is worth mentioning.

right now it is updated whenever its rdeps (firefox and chromium in
stable) need newer versions. once e.g. a stable Debian kernel has
similar requirements, I guess the same would apply there. I am not sure
upstream kernel development on Debian stable would be enough of an
argument to update it (or provide similar packages), but I am not a
member of the teams that would make that decision.

we currently don't provide multiple versions in parallel (like GCC or
LLVM though) besides this special affordance for browsers. I am not sure
this would be a good idea either given rustc's release cadence ;)

as discussed off-list, -backports might be a better place for providing
more recent toolchain packages on Debian stable, and independent from
this thread, I have pondered providing them there in the past already.
backports would only ship one version as well though, and at most the
one in testing (so it would also be affected by the freeze period, just
like unstable and testing).

> > https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/rust-cbindgen-web
> 
> We may use `cbindgen` too in the future, but not currently.

it's used by firefox :)

> Is something like `bindgen-web` also available for stable?

not yet, but could conceivably be provided once/iff there is a need (see
above).