[Pkg-rust-maintainers] Facilitating Firefox+Rust Linux distro packaging

[Ximin Luo]

Henri Sivonen:
> [..] Firefox ESR stays the closest to Debian's aspiration.
> 
> [..]
> 
> Note how of the browsers that can render the modern Web, Firefox is
> already the most accommodating of Debian's wishes with ESR. ESR at
> least approximates the "security patches with no new features"
> aspiration of Debian, up to a point, while the Chromium package gets
> new features all the time and the WebKit packages don't get security
> patches.

I'm getting confused by this thread. Henri, am I right to summarise your proposal as:

"(1) we should package non-ESR firefox in Debian stable, because (2) it's not much more work than doing firefox-esr, because (3) we will probably want to update rustc/llvm across ESR minor versions anyway?"

In this case, what *is* the difference between firefox and firefox-esr? In other words, does doing (3) not break your own principles on what firefox-esr should be about?

> there wouldn't be a rustc bump over many versions.

As I mentioned earlier: having to re-bootstrap rustc from upstream to allow non-consecutive rustc version upgrades, I think is not a major problem for Debian stable or Debian in general.

> Debian already has the technical means of shipping multiple
> side-by-side llvm-x.y and clang-x.y packages. It looks to me it would
> be technically possible to promote an additional llvm-x.y & clang-x.y
> package set from unstable to stable during the lifetime of stable.

Doing this multiple times raises the costs for Debian. It would really reduce our (and other distros') work if (for firefox-esr) rustc and rust-bindgen could depend on the same LLVM version. What are the costs for arranging this on your side?

> The reason why I'm keen to get six-weekly rustc updates in main
> instead of -backports is that based on empirical evidence from how
> users behave in relation to other packages, having an old rustc in
> Debian's main archive is likely to pose a negative externality on the
> Rust ecosystem in the form Debian users bothering crate authors about
> supporting Rust versions that are obsolete from the point of view of
> the Rust ecosystem.

Debian stable users should not be using /usr/bin/rustc for anything other than building Debian stable packages. We can make that very clear in the documentation and/or print giant warning signs, if that would make sense to you.

For the purpose of interoperating with the rustc upstream ecosystem (or others), yes everyone should use Debian testing/unstable. In my personal opinion, we really need to rename "stable" "testing" etc to make this more obvious.

X

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