"brian m. carlson" <sandals@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> On 2024-08-07 at 18:21:31, Josh Steadmon wrote:
> > diff --git a/contrib/cgit-rs/Cargo.toml b/contrib/cgit-rs/Cargo.toml
> > index 7b55e6f3e1..5768fce9e5 100644
> > --- a/contrib/cgit-rs/Cargo.toml
> > +++ b/contrib/cgit-rs/Cargo.toml
> > @@ -14,3 +14,4 @@ path = "src/lib.rs"
> >
> > [dependencies]
> > libc = "0.2.155"
> > +home = "0.5.9"
>
> Okay, here's where we get to my previous mention of supported platforms.
> This depends on Rust 1.70, and Debian stable has only 1.63. Trying
> `cargo build --release` on that version returns this:
>
> Downloaded home v0.5.9
> Downloaded libc v0.2.155
> Downloaded 2 crates (752.3 KB) in 0.17s
> error: package `home v0.5.9` cannot be built because it requires rustc 1.70.0 or newer, while the currently active rustc version is 1.63.0
>
> My recommended approach here is to support the version in Debian stable,
> plus the version in Debian oldstable for a year after the new stable
> comes out, which is what I do. That gives people a year to upgrade if
> they want to use our code. We _don't_ want to follow the
> latest-stable-Rust approach because it isn't appropriate that software
> has a six-week lifespan of support and that isn't going to work for
> software like Git that people often compile locally on older versions.
>
> We also need to be conscious that while Rust upstream provides some
> binaries for some platforms, many platforms rely on the distro packages
> because Rust upstream doesn't ship binaries for their target. Thus,
> simply using rustup is not viable for many targets, which is another
> reason that latest-stable-Rust won't fly.
>
> Debian stable is the version that most projects who have defined
> lifespans track, so it's also what we should track. According to my
> recommended approach, that would be 1.63.
After getting rid of the `home` crate, the only other issue we ran into
downgrading the version to 1.63 was with `std::ffi{c_char, c_int}`.
Those were only made available in 1.64 and they are obviously quite
necessary for us to be able to call C functions. Do you know of any
alternatives we can use? I also don't think reinventing the wheel with
our own implementation makes sense in this case, and even if Debian were
to upgrade stable to a higher version today, we would still need to
support oldstable for another year.
