Daniel wrote a lovely blog post about Rust’s ability to be included in distributions, both as a language that you can get via the distribution, and as the language that components of the distribution are being written in.
I think this is a great goal to raise and I have just a few thoughts and quibbles. First I want to acknowledge and agree with him on the Rust community, its so very nice, and he is doing a great thing as rustup lead; I wish I had more time to put in, I have more things I want to contribute to rustup. I’ll try to get back to the meetings soon.
On trust
I completely agree about the need for the crates index improvement : without those we cannot have a mirror network, and thats a significant issue for offline users and slow-region users.
On curlsh though
It isn’t the worst possible thing, for all that its “untrusted bootstrapping”, the actual thing downloaded is https secured etc, and so is the rustup binary itself. Put another way, I think the horror is more perceptual than analyzed risk. Someone that trusts Verisign etc enough to download the Debian installer enough over it, has exactly the same risk as someone trusting Verisign enough to download rustup at that point in time.
Cross signing curlsh that with per-distro keys or something seems pretty ridiculous to me, since the root of trust is still that first download; unless you’re wandering up to someone who has bootstrapped their compiler by hand (to avoid reflections-on-trust attacks), to get an installer, to build a system, to then do reproducible builds, to check that other systems are actually safe… aieeee.
I think its easier to package the curl|sh shell script in Debian itself perhaps? apt install get-rustup; then if / when rustup becomes packaged the user instructions don’t change but the root of trust would, as get-rustup would be updated to not download rustup, but to trigger a different package install, and so forth.
I don’t think its desirable though, to have distribution forks of the contents that rustup manages – Debian+Redhat+Suse+… builds of nightly rust with all the things failing or not, and so on – I don’t see who that would help. And if we don’t have that then the root of trust would still not be shifted under the GPG keychain – it would still be the HTTPS infrastructure for downloading rust toolchains + the integrity of the rustup toolchain builds themselves. Making rustup, which currently shares that trust, have a different trust root, seems pointless.
On duplication of dependencies
I think Debian needs to become more inclusive here, not Rustup. Debian has spent; pauses, counts, yes, DECADES, rejecting multiple entire ecosystems because of a prejuidiced view about what the Right Way to manage dependencies is. And they are not right in a universal sense. They were right in an engineering sense: given constraints (builds are expensive, bandwidth is expensive, disk is expensive), they are right. But those are not universal constraints, and seeking to impose those constraints on Java and Node – its been an unmitigated disaster. It hasn’t made those upstreams better, or more secure, or systematically fixed problems for users. I have another post on this so rather than repeating I’m going to stop here :).
I think Rust has – like those languages – made the crucial, maintainer and engineering efficiency important choice to embrace enabling incremental change across libraries, with the consequence that dependencies don’t shift atomically, and sure, this is basically incompatible with Debian packaging world view which says that point and patch releases of libraries are not distinct packages, and thus the shared libs for these things all coexist in the same file on disk. Boom! Crash!
I assert that it is entirely possible to come up with a reasonable design for managing a respository of software that doesn’t make this conflation, would allow actual point and patch releases of exist as they are for the languages that have this characteristic, and be amenable to automation, auditing and reporting for security issues. E.g. Modernise Debian to cope with this fundamentally different language design decision… which would make Java and Node and Rust work so very much better.
Alternatively, if Debian doesn’t want to make it possible to natively support languages that have made this choice, Debian could:
- ship static-but-for-system-libs builds
- not include things written in rust
- ask things written in rust to converge their dependencies again and again and again (and only update them when the transitive dependencies across the entire distro have converged)
I have a horrible suspicion about which Debian will choose to do :(. The blinkers / echo chamber are so very strong in that community.
For Windows
We got to parity with Linux for IO for non-McAfee users, but I guess there are a lot of them out there; we probably need to keep pushing on tweaking it until it work better for them too; perhaps autodetect McAfee and switch to minimal? I agree that making Windows users – like I am these days – feel tier one, would be nice :). Maybe a survey of user experience would be a good starting point.
Shared libraries
Perhaps generating versioned symbols automatically and building many versions of the crate and then munging them together? But I’d also like to point here again that the whole focus on shared libraries is a bit of a distribution blind spot, and looking at the vast amount of distribution of software occuring in app stores and their model, suggests different ways of dealing with these things. See also the fairly specific suggestion I make about the packaging system in Debian that is the root of the problem in my entirely humble view.
Bonus
John Goerzen posted an entirely different thing recently, but in it he discusses programs that don’t properly honour terminfo. Sadly I happen to know that large chunks of the Rust ecosystem assume that everything is ANSI these days, and it certainly sounds like, at least for John, that isn’t true. So thats another way in which Rust could be more inclusive – use these things that have been built, rather than being modern and new age and reinventing the 95% match.
Code happens 