Re: musings on rust packaging [was Re: F38 proposal: RPM Sequoia (System-Wide Change proposal)]

[Michel Alexandre Salim]

Hi all,

Just a note that over the summer, our intern did a project to try and
address some of these issues (namely, that while it's trivial to convert
a single crate to an RPM, trying to automate packaging all the
dependencies and making sure that you don't break anything else while
doing so is tedious and error-prone). Matt and Fabio might recall me
getting their inputs on this several months ago.

The tool:
- recursively checking out packages
- updating existing packages while carrying over manual changes
- creating compatibility packages when upgrading packages with dependents
- automate parallel COPR test builds of sets of packages in dependency order
- chain-build all packages in Koji with requested side tag
- merging and chain-building all packages across release branches
- help review a rust update in Bodhi and verify no compatibility issues are introduced

It does not automatically commit anything, of course, and right now is a
bit opinionated in favor of picking the lowest satisfactory version
possible, which is probably not what we want long term -- but it
hopefully provides a nice foundation on which to build on

I've finally gotten round to doing some polishing and getting it
packaged:
- updates for Fedora 36, 37, and Rawhide:
https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/?search=rust-update-set-0.0.1&...
- Pagure repo: https://pagure.io/fedora-rust/rust-update-set

There are some fixes for corner cases I encountered while trying to update our
`below` packages with this, and some changes needed to get this packageable,
but those are minor. It mostly works really well, and is at a stage where
hopefully people can take a look and make suggestions for improvements.

Best regards,

-- 
Michel Alexandre Salim
identities: https://keyoxide.org/5dce2e7e9c3b1cffd335c1d78b229d2f7ccc04f2