Subject: [alpine-devel] Help needed for porting rust

From: Natanael Copa <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2018 16:20:40 +0200

Hi!

We have currently only rust on x86_64, and we need to port it to the
rest of our supported architectures. Recent versions of both
firefox-esr and librsvg requires rust.

The following packages will disappear from architectures not having
rust:

abiword
darktable
deluge
emacs
eog
eom
firefox
firefox-esr
gegl
gimp
gnome-system-monitor
goffice
graphviz
gst-plugins-bad
gst-plugins-bad0.10
imagemagick
imagemagick6
jwm
librsvg
mate-panel
mate-system-monitor
netsurf
nicotine-plus
ocaml-lablgtk
openbox
pike
tint2
vlc
xfce4-xkb-plugin

Please let me know if you think you will be able to help us port rust
to any of our currently unsupported architectures within a couple of
weeks. Otherwise the above packages will be available on x86_64 on the
alpine v3.9 release.

Thanks!

---
Unsubscribe:  [email-masked]
Help:         [email-masked]
---

---

From: Kevin Chadwick <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2018 16:27:20 +0100

On Thu, 4 Oct 2018 16:20:40 +0200

> openbox

Out of interest, may I ask why openbox is on that list as AFAIK, it's C
has not been touched in 3 years and doesn't utilise rust?

---

---

From: Natanael Copa <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2018 21:19:27 +0200

On Thu, 4 Oct 2018 16:27:20 +0100

> has not been touched in 3 years and doesn't utilise rust?

Because it is linked to librsvg and recent versions of librsvg
requires rust[1].

[1]: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2017-January/msg00001.html

---

---

From: "A. Wilcox" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2018 14:20:59 -0500

> has not been touched in 3 years and doesn't utilise rust?

It depends on librsvg.  Adélie is specifically shipping an older version
of librsvg to prevent the Rust dependency unless and until we are able
to ship Rust on all of our architectures, but Alpine has forged ahead
and bumped to the version that requires Rust.

Porting Rust is hell, BTW.  We've spent at least two months on it, and
right now we have:

* working on x86_64
* working on ppc64
* syntax error in rust compiler during stage2 build on arm64
* crashing (segfault) during stage1 build on pmmx (i586)
* crashing during bootstrap on ppc in pthreads code

Since Firefox 52 ESR is EOL we are pretty desperate to make this happen,
and I'd say a good 10+ hours of my time every week has gone in to trying
to make it work.  We also have a contributor who has spent basically all
his free time in the past month working on it.  It's bad.

--arw

-- 
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Open-source programmer (C, C++, Python)
https://code.foxkit.us/u/awilfox/

---

From: "A. Wilcox" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2018 14:15:48 -0500

> The following packages will disappear from architectures not having

No loss; the upstream developers only support x86_64 and are actually
not amenable to ports to other arches.  Personal experience.

> emacs

I implore you to simply stop shipping the -gtk variant.  I doubt it is
used so much and then you wouldn't have the librsvg dep.

> imagemagick

Again, you could simply remove the librsvg dep from these, and they
would lose a bit of functionality but still function on other architectures.

--arw

-- 
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
https://www.adelielinux.org

---

From: Natanael Copa <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2018 21:24:42 +0200

On Thu, 4 Oct 2018 14:15:48 -0500

> would lose a bit of functionality but still function on other architectures.

Right, we could just remove svg support on libs/apps where its optional.

But what I'd prefer is some help with porting rust to the other arches.

Thanks!

-nc

---

From: "Milan P. Stanic" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2018 00:21:23 +0200

> But what I'd prefer is some help with porting rust to the other arches.

As a user, how I can help?
I don't have experience with rust but I have aarch64 machine and I want
to help if I can, of course.

-- 

---

---

From: Jeff Pohlmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2018 15:46:27 -0500

JWM can be built without SVG support. Actually I would prefer it that
way, since JWM is intended to be tiny and librsvg pulls in some
relatively large dependencies.

 - Jeff

---

---

From: kpcyrd <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2018 16:09:47 +0000

> weeks. Otherwise the above packages will be available on x86_64 on the

Can you elaborate what is currently blocking alpine from shipping rust
on non x86_64 architectures? I'm using rust successfully on a few arm
variants I keep as a test farm (with glibc though).

You may also want to have a look at the debian-rust project, cargo and
ripgrep are currently available for quite a few architectures in debian
testing. The architectures that were causing issues are mostly mips
variants, which seems to be llvm related.

Have you tried reaching out to the rust project/community in general? It
seems a lot of people are currently unaware of the issues that alpine is
facing with rust and I think you might have more luck getting people to
contribute.

Thanks for your work!

---