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> Fedora's rationale for including Rust stems from both the language's growing popularity and its potential relevance to Fedora's user base. Maybe this makes m

> Fedora's rationale for including Rust stems from both the language's growing popularity and its potential relevance to Fedora's user base. Maybe this makes me unique, but I don't think so; unless the tool is absolutely required for the operation of the system, why include it? I always find that I need to override any installed compilers/languages with my own. In addition, I usually forgo using the system paths for ones I manage on my own. I'm never sure if my upgrading to versions I want will break some component in the system. This happened to many times to me, so I started installing everything to my local user on the machine. Rustup in rust is exactly what I want. Similarly in Python, virtual environments, in Java I always install the jdk to a local bin, to get a specific version. Don't get me wrong, I wish everyone were using Rust, I just don't know how useful the system install version is.

pm215 10y ago
On the other hand my general view is that I will always prefer the system install of a language environment, because I know the distro is going to take care of ensuring it works with the distro config, updating it with security bugs and making sure it doesn't break when I update the distro in future. In fact "doesn't exist in distros yet" is one of the major reasons I haven't got round to investigating Rust yet. And the distro themselves will want to be using their own packaged version of the language to build any other programs that are written in that language, for reproducibility reasons.
pm215 10y ago
On the other hand my general view is that I will always prefer the system install of a language environment, because I know the distro is going to take care of ensuring it works with the distro config, updating it with security bugs and making sure it doesn't break when I update the distro in future. In fact "doesn't exist in distros yet" is one of the major reasons I haven't got round to investigating Rust yet.
anonbanker 10y ago
Remember that the same thing happened with Mono; it began being included long before there were .Net apps in the default release.
- sjellis 10y ago
  Fedora folks have been thinking about this problem for a while, and in the long-term we may see the distribution get restructured to address it: https://blog.fishsoup.net/2016/08/24/summer-talks-purpleegg/ https://blog.fishsoup.net/2016/08/24/summer-talks-purpleegg/ TLDR: There are no commitments yet, but we may see a future version of Fedora Workstation that consists of an immutable, replace-only base OS, applications delivered by Flatpak, and tooling for containerized development environments. AIUI, RPM packages would still be used to compose the base OS and provide software for development and server containers.
ravenstine 10y ago
I understand the rationale behind such a decision, thought personally I would rather install languages and tools through other means so I can keep up to date rather than be concerned with the remote chance of a stability issue on my OS. Lots of programs have Python as a dependency so it makes sense to have it included by default, but Ruby, Node, and Rust? Just seems like a waste of effort and possibly disk space(if it is preinstalled) when most users are going to install their own packages as part of a tool chain that has nothing to do with supporting components of the operating system. I am usually much happier when my software isn't so coupled with the OS, even though that kind of goes against what seems to be a Linux philosophy. I would be even happier if distros would just stick to supporting low level libraries, kernel modules, and necessary UI components rather than spend a bunch of time creating a complete system.
- johnny22 10y ago
  They only get installed if you install things that require them as dependencies. Rust would need to be packaged to build future versions of Firefox with the distro build tools.

pm215 10y ago

On the other hand my general view is that I will always prefer the system install of a language environment, because I know the distro is going to take care of ensuring it works with the distro config, updating it with security bugs and making sure it doesn't break when I update the distro in future. In fact "doesn't exist in distros yet" is one of the major reasons I haven't got round to investigating Rust yet. And the distro themselves will want to be using their own packaged version of the language to build any other programs that are written in that language, for reproducibility reasons.

pm215 10y ago

anonbanker 10y ago

Remember that the same thing happened with Mono; it began being included long before there were .Net apps in the default release.

sjellis 10y ago
Fedora folks have been thinking about this problem for a while, and in the long-term we may see the distribution get restructured to address it: https://blog.fishsoup.net/2016/08/24/summer-talks-purpleegg/ https://blog.fishsoup.net/2016/08/24/summer-talks-purpleegg/ TLDR: There are no commitments yet, but we may see a future version of Fedora Workstation that consists of an immutable, replace-only base OS, applications delivered by Flatpak, and tooling for containerized development environments. AIUI, RPM packages would still be used to compose the base OS and provide software for development and server containers.

ravenstine 10y ago

I understand the rationale behind such a decision, thought personally I would rather install languages and tools through other means so I can keep up to date rather than be concerned with the remote chance of a stability issue on my OS. Lots of programs have Python as a dependency so it makes sense to have it included by default, but Ruby, Node, and Rust? Just seems like a waste of effort and possibly disk space(if it is preinstalled) when most users are going to install their own packages as part of a tool chain that has nothing to do with supporting components of the operating system. I am usually much happier when my software isn't so coupled with the OS, even though that kind of goes against what seems to be a Linux philosophy. I would be even happier if distros would just stick to supporting low level libraries, kernel modules, and necessary UI components rather than spend a bunch of time creating a complete system.

johnny22 10y ago
They only get installed if you install things that require them as dependencies. Rust would need to be packaged to build future versions of Firefox with the distro build tools.