[build2] Rust

[Boris Kolpackov]

Matthew Krupcale <mkrupcale at matthewkrupcale.com> writes:

> > I've been thinking about this (and this idea is also echoed in the
> > issues you have linked): it feels like we need some sort of "foreign
> > package" support in build2 that can be used to consume dependencies
> > from other package managers.
> 
> In principle, build2 has one already: pkg-config. The problem is I
> guess this is mostly only useful for C/C++(/fortran?) packages, and
> not all C/C++ projects provide pkg-config files. So yeah, you're
> probably right that there needs to be a way to consume packages from
> other package managers.

pkg-config is not really a package manager, it's just a way to query
library metadata that has been built and installed in some unspecified
way. What I am thinking about is the ability to specify (say, in the
manifest) that libfoo comes from a "foreign" package manager/repository
and have bpkg automatically call that manager to build it.

But I guess this wouldn't help distribution maintainers much since they
replace the bpkg's functionality with the distribution's package manager.
And that means they will have to deal with the "foreign" manager as well.


> > Crate dependency discovery:          https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/crate-dependency-discovery/11418
> 
> Interesting read. Seems like this is still unresolved, though, and
> it's unclear if there's interest in improving the dependency
> discovery.

Yes. One nice thing I noticed about Rust (and you can see this quite
a bit in this thread), is that the community is not afraid to admit
limitations or deficiencies.