Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Alessandro Barbieri <lssndrbarbieri@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] dev-python/cryptography to use rust, effectively killing alpha, hppa, ia64, m68k, s390
Date: Mon, 08 Feb 2021 17:56:13
Message-Id: CACfyCdXE7CJFj1WDeE2OYFwh_949gMpCe8S=yx_7JBHUsAvjZQ@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: [gentoo-dev] dev-python/cryptography to use rust, effectively killing alpha, hppa, ia64, m68k, s390 by "Michał Górny"
1 Il Lun 8 Feb 2021, 12:19 Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o> ha scritto:
2
3 > Hi,
4 >
5 > FYI the developers of dev-python/cryptography decided that Rust is going
6 > to be mandatory for 1.5+ versions. It's unlikely that they're going to
7 > provide LTS support or security fixes for the old versions.
8 >
9 > Since cryptography is a very important package in the Python ecosystem,
10 > and it is an indirect dependency of Portage, this means that we will
11 > probably have to entirely drop support for architectures that are not
12 > supported by Rust.
13 >
14 > According to upstream platform support information [1], this probably
15 > means (eventually) entirely removing the following architectures:
16 > - alpha (stable)
17 > - hppa (stable)
18 > - ia64 (stable)
19 > - m68k (exp)
20 > - s390 (except for s390x, exp)
21 >
22 > Furthermore, the Gentoo Rust packages are missing support
23 > for the following platforms, apparently supported upstream:
24 > - mips (exp)
25 > - ppc (32) (stable)
26 > - sparc (stable)
27 > - s390x (exp)
28 > - riscv (stable)
29 >
30 > Apparently it's non-trivial to bootstrap Rust on these platforms,
31 > so it's unclear when Gentoo is going to start providing Rust on them.
32 >
33 > I've raised a protest on the cryptography bug tracker [2] but apparently
34 > upstream considers Rust's 'memory safety' more important than ability to
35 > actually use the package.
36 >
37 > Honestly, I don't think it likely that Rust will gain support for these
38 > platforms. This involves a lot of work, starting with writing a new
39 > LLVM backend and getting it accepted (getting new code into LLVM is very
40 > hard unless you're doing that on behalf one of the big companies). You
41 > can imagine how much effort that involves compared to rewriting the new
42 > code from Cryptography into C.
43 >
44 > If we can't convince upstream, I'm afraid we'll either have to drop
45 > these architectures entirely or fork Cryptography.
46 >
47 >
48 > [1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/rustc/platform-support.html
49 > [2] https://github.com/pyca/cryptography/issues/5771
50 >
51 > --
52 > Best regards,
53 > Michał Górny
54 >
55
56 Should we shed tears for those legacy architectures or move forward? Does
57 anyone really use them in production?
58
59 >

Replies