On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 7:35 PM, Brian Anderson <[email protected]> wrote: > Hey. > > One of my goals for 0.10 is to make the Rust installation and upgrade > experience better. My personal ambitions are to make Rust installable with a > single shell command, distribute binaries, not source, and to have both > nightlies and point releases. > > Since we're already able to create highly-compatible snapshot compilers, it > should be relatively easy to extend our snapshot procedure to produce > complete binaries, installable via a cross-platform shell script. This would > require the least amount of effort and maintenance because we don't need to > use any specific package managers or add new bots, and a single installer > can work on all Linuxes. > > We can also attempt to package Rust with various of the most common package > managers: homebrew, macports, dpkg, rpm. There community-maintained packages > for some of these already, so we don't necessarily need to redevelop from > scratch if we just want to adopt one or all of them as official packages. We > could also create a GUI installer for OS X, but I'm not sure how important > that is. > > What shall we do?
I think Rust should prefer first-party distribution packages when they are available and up-to-date. It would be okay to have a generic Linux installer as a last resort, but it's not ideal as the package manager won't be keeping it up-to-date and it won't be fully integrated with the system. A package tailored to the system can install the support for various text editors to the right places and update the mime database for Rust files. It also allows for linking against the system LLVM libraries when Rust is able to use the stable LLVM release without patches. I'll continue packaging the latest stable Rust release in the official Arch Linux repositories. There are nightly builds hosted on Arch's build server and maintaining it just involves a quick upload of the new PKGBUILD via ssh. It would be great to have the nightly repository hosted on <rust-lang.org>, but it would involve maintaining an Arch virtual machine. FWIW, this would also be a good way to host `playpen` for executing code on the front page and documentation. _______________________________________________ Rust-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev
