Do we have a plan being executed to make sure that when Gecko components written in Rust ship on the release channel in Mozilla-produced builds the also ship in the Firefox packages of various Linux distributions?
If not, we really need to put such a plan in place, since it would be bad to have a conflict between our ability to reach Linux users and our ability to benefit from Rust quickly. My concern is that Linux distributions tend to have a policy that binary packages have to be buildable from source packages using the tools that are available in the package repository of the distro. Considering the current state of rustc availability in distro repositories, it seems to me that we are headed towards a problem. As far as I can tell, of the well-known distributions only Arch and openSUSE have the current rustc in their package repositories (and the openSUSE packages are categorized as "unstable"). Debian has it in unstable and testing only. Gentoo is a couple of rustc releases out of date. Ubuntu and Fedora don't have any version of rustc anywhere at all. At least in the case of Fedora, just shipping a rustc binary alongside the Firefox source is explicitly not good enough for their policy: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#No_inclusion_of_pre-built_binaries_or_libraries Can we get Debian stable, Ubuntu and Fedora to ship a rustc package as a build dependency for Firefox every six weeks like the Firefox package itself in order for Firefox not to miss the 6-week train when Rust code ships in Mozilla-built Firefox and for Firefox to be able to co-evolve with rustc instead of getting stuck to an old rustc due to distro LTS cycles? (I'm assuming that it won't be a big deal to get Gentoo to pick up the most recent rustc when the use case shows up.) (Part of the problem seems to be at Mozilla's end, since rustc and the Rust standard lib don't compile with the stable rustc itself and the previous stable version of rustc making it hard to maintain a truly self-hosting package lineage as required by the Fedora policy.) -- Henri Sivonen hsivo...@hsivonen.fi https://hsivonen.fi/ _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform