Re: Suitability of Rust for *all* architectures? [WAS Re: Rustc unsoundness on i386]
On Sun, Nov 24, 2024 at 12:28:28PM +0500, Andrey Rakhmatullin wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 23, 2024 at 07:05:39PM +0000, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> > > > B) bump the i386 baseline in Debian to require SSE2, and stop disabling SSE2 there in rustc
> > >
> > > As suggested by Chris, and a popular opinion/request in general.
> > >
> >
> > Considering that for Trixie we won't have an i386 installer, particularly:
> > it seems evident to me that as more software depends on Rust, less of it
> > will be usable on i386 (and possibly something like armhf in due course.)
> > This whether or not we rebase the hardware requirements for an architecture.
>
> Sorry, I don't get it.
>
Hi - sorry I might have conflated more than one thing: let's see if I can make
myself more clear.
1. Rust itself is fast-moving and difficult to package/deal with. There's a
couple of threads on LWN.net on this at the moment. There's a further
distinction between Rust in general and Rust in the Linux kernel itself -
which is further behind Rust head development. In general: Support in
Debian is difficult for fast-moving software without guaranteed backward
compatibility long term.
2. Upstream Rust doesn't particularly care about 32 bit i386 - so it's a
Debian thing to try and produce appropriate binaries including Rust wherever
they are.
3. There are packages including Rust that can't be built on 32 bit / can't be
built on some of Debian's ports. Firefox is one, I think - and there's the
general problem that some larger packages like libreoffice are marginal on
some architectures, without considering Rust. That situation can only get
worse with time.
4. The consensus seems to be that i386 in Trixie won't have an installer
built for it - there's no kernel support in the most recent kernels. The
architecture is being maintained primarily for compatibility with older
software (also the reason for no time_t64 transition on i386).
5. If we're moving hardware baselines for the sake of Rust (or any other
software on this architecture) it's already too late.
Does this help? I don't have a horse in this race, so this is purely an
opinion to be considered,
All the very best, as ever,
Andy
(amacater@debian.org)
>
> --
> WBR, wRAR
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