Advice for cross-distro-release support would be nice about cargo-deb

[kornelski]

There's --no-build for this. build with cross however you want, and then package with --no-build.

[kornelski]

My rationale is that I use macOS and develop code on macOS. I simply can't install dpkg on my daily driver OS :)

While cross-building for glibc-based distos is a major hassle, especially if C dependencies are involved, it's still doable. I have some pure-Rust projects that I build for musl and package on macOS host.

Secondary issue is that deb-related tools aren't available out of the box, and need to be installed manually, pulling in their own dependencies, and are tied to particular Debian version, so they may be outdated and fiddly to deal with.
It is a bit of a NIH syndrome, but pure-Rust tools are easier to use by Rust projects, and this is true for cargo-deb development as well as downstream Rust users of cargo-deb.

I've made cargo-deb run on Windows only because it's funny.

[kornelski]

I don't think cargo-deb can do anything about this. As far as this crate is concerned, all systems are the same.

Issues like deps versions and glibc shenanigans are related to specifics of the build, and cargo-deb merely calls cargo build --release and doesn't micromanage the builds.

In practice you may get away with building the whole project on the oldest OS that you support, using a container or a VM.

[abentley]

Right. That makes sense. At the same time, using a VM or container is exactly what cross-rs automates, so it seems like there's an opportunity for integration between the two projects.

Anyhow, would you welcome an update to the readme?

[kornelski]

I suppose a small mention will be ok, but I wouldn't want to end up with a comprehensive list of what this crate doesn't do :)

[Revertron]

Is it possible to add some parameter to cargo-deb just to use cross instead of cargo?
It would be very helpful.

[boris-kolpackov]

This is only tangentially related but I couldn't find a better place to ask (but feel free to point me to such a place): I am studying the overall approach of cargo-deb and it appears the package is created fully manually without any use of dpkg or any higher-level helpers provided by Debian. My initial guess at the reason was that it would allow creating the package on different versions of Debian/Ubuntu or even on different Linux distributions. But based on the above discussion this does not appear to be the case (plus there are a few calls to dpkg and dh_* machinery). So can anyone (perhaps @kornelski ?) provide some rationale for going with this "from scratch" approach? Thanks in advance for any insight!