New subject: Upcoming removal of rust2rpm + major Rust packaging toolchain update for EPEL 9

26 Feb 2023


      Hello EPEL packagers,
The latest version of the Rust packaging toolchain will soon be
available for EPEL 9 (i.e. rust2rpm v24, rust-packaging v24, and
cargo2rpm v0.1). This is a major upgrade from rust2rpm v21 which is
currently in EPEL 9, but also comes with the drawback that it now
requires Python >= 3.10.
However, I have split the Rust packaging tools into three separate
projects (previously everything was in a monorepo) to make packaging
them easier:
The two components which are needed at build-time (RPM macros + the
cargo2rpm Python module that powers them) can still be built for EPEL
9, as cargo2rpm has no third-party dependencies and only needs Python
...
= 3.10, and will hence be built with python3.11 on EPEL 9 as soon as
that is available.
The spec generator (rust2rpm) has also been split off from
rust-packaging into a separate package, which will *not* be available
on EPEL 9. rust2rpm requires Python >= 3.10, but it also has a few
non-trivial third-party dependencies (most notably, jinja2). Since
most Rust packagers primarily work on Fedora, I don't think the effort
of packaging all missing dependencies for Python 3.11 just to make
/usr/bin/rust2rpm available for EPEL 9 would be worth it.
There are three Pull Requests which will implement this update:
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/cargo2rpm/pull-request/1
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/rust-packaging/pull-request/6
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/epel-rpm-macros/pull-request/65
(kudos to @gotmax23!)
These changes (i.e. rust-packaging v24 + cargo2rpm) have now been live
in "production" in Fedora for over a week, and based on user and CI
feedback, I expect these updates to cause no regressions on EPEL 9.
Fabio