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> And it's common practice to install new releases as soon as they come out without waiting for distros to pick them up. That's the problem. It's not the rele

> And it's common practice to install new releases as soon as they come out without waiting for distros to pick them up. That's the problem. It's not the release schedule that's the problem. The answer I've arrived at, right now, is to make the default version of the Ubuntu LTS release immediately prior to the latest, my default. Is that arbitrary? Yes. Might that change if some very cool Rust features are included in 1.64 -- like, if let chains? Yeah. So should the Rust community perhaps develop best practices on MSRV, at the very least notifying if a package deviates from MSRV norms? Maybe. Is this a big problem? Let's be real -- no, not really.

tialaramex 4y ago
What you'd expect, and what I think we see, is that over time the new features are less "must have" and so fewer programmers will chase the latest version. There's quite a gap between "Now arrays implement IntoIterator" (about a year ago, you can e.g. write for loops over an array) and "Termination is now stable" (May 2022, you can have custom exit code handling in your program) I'm sure a few people were excited about Termination, but practically everybody uses IntoIterator and arrays. So of course they would want that feature. As a Linux user I remember manually compiling 1.3.x back when odd numbered micro meant "Unstable" because 1.2 didn't have features I really cared about. Today I just run whatever kernel the OS installed. Are there important new Linux features in linux-next? Probably, maybe I will read about them in LWN and look forward to them, I'm definitely not going to bother compiling it by hand for any new feature I can imagine.
- mustache_kimono 4y ago
  This also touches on a really important point -- all this takes place in a context. What is the context? One context -- sometimes there are exciting new features! Another context -- this issue is mostly about users who want to build your software from source (this isn't a problem for you, as such), but who don't want to download a new copy of the compiler to do that. Is this a large group of users, if you're not a library? I don't think so.

tialaramex 4y ago

What you'd expect, and what I think we see, is that over time the new features are less "must have" and so fewer programmers will chase the latest version. There's quite a gap between "Now arrays implement IntoIterator" (about a year ago, you can e.g. write for loops over an array) and "Termination is now stable" (May 2022, you can have custom exit code handling in your program) I'm sure a few people were excited about Termination, but practically everybody uses IntoIterator and arrays. So of course they would want that feature. As a Linux user I remember manually compiling 1.3.x back when odd numbered micro meant "Unstable" because 1.2 didn't have features I really cared about. Today I just run whatever kernel the OS installed. Are there important new Linux features in linux-next? Probably, maybe I will read about them in LWN and look forward to them, I'm definitely not going to bother compiling it by hand for any new feature I can imagine.

mustache_kimono 4y ago
This also touches on a really important point -- all this takes place in a context. What is the context? One context -- sometimes there are exciting new features! Another context -- this issue is mostly about users who want to build your software from source (this isn't a problem for you, as such), but who don't want to download a new copy of the compiler to do that. Is this a large group of users, if you're not a library? I don't think so.