Packaging

This page is summarizing some issues with the current (something pre-0.6) rust code which makes it difficult to package for downstream distributions - or even prevents it in some cases (e.g. because it doesn't follow the packaging policy of Fedora).

Issues

Hardcoded libdir

• Issue 5223 An hardcoded libdir is problematic when the downstream distribution uses arch specific libdirs e.g. lib for i686 and lib64 for x86_64

Extensive usage of rpath

• Issue 5219 rpaths are problematic in several ways (see the links given in the issue).

Patched LLVM - ARM only

• Issue 4259 At least for arm based builds rust is using a patched llvm. It seems that a stock llvm can be used for x86 builds.But also see the next issue.

--llvm-root switch doesn't work

• Issue 6802 The --llvm-root switch should allow the usage of an external (existing) llvm, but this is currently not working.

Tightly coupled with libuv

• Issue 5563 Rust is currently tighly coupled to libuv. Typically downstream distributions don't allow bundling of 3rdparty libs. A downstream packaging effort should package libuv in advance. It might be a bit problematic to keep libuv and rust versions in sync during this early stage.

Minor notes

• Bootstrap binary is required. You can either let it download its own, or download the most recent snapshot binary yourself. The snapshot SHA1s are listed in src/snapshots.txt and the script src/etc/get-snapshot.py downloads them from our server. The simplest thing to do is just copy the appropriate snapshot into the dl/ subdirectory of your build dir; get-snapshot.py will pick it up from there and avoid downloading anything.