Concerns Regarding the Choice of Rust for the Xfce Wayland Compositor

[Yves-Alexis Perez]

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On Wed, 2026-08-12 at 22:56 -0700, Brian Tarricone wrote:
> > I don't really think that'll possible, nor scalable, to have multiple
> > versions
> > of the same packages. I don't think we have (yet?) gtk3-rs in Debian so
> > maybe
> > we'll not be the only one with issues.
> 
> Debian seems to already do this, though.  For example, the `rand` crate has:
> 
> librust-rand-0.8-dev/testing 0.8.6+dfsg-1 amd64
> librust-rand-dev/testing 0.10.2+dfsg-1 amd64
> 
> It looks like the convention is that the latest "major" version gets a
> package name with no version number in it, and older ones get the "major"
> version (major.minor for 0.y, that is) in the package name.

Thanks for the pointer.
> 
> In the past few hours I've apparently volunteered to start maintaining gtk3-
> rs (and someone from the GNOME Rust team who responded on Matrix is ok with
> it).  First on my list is to get it building against the current versions of
> some of those old dependencies that `cargo debstatus` flagged, so that could
> be one issue that doesn't end up needing to be resolved.

Aha, sorry!
> 
> > > Then there are a few crates where xfwl4 depends on something older or
> > > newer
> > > than what Debian packages; I assume that's a matter of packaging version
> > > xfwl4 needs.  For stuff where they're semver-incompatible, I see
> > > packages in
> > > Debian's archive where older incompatible versions of a package are
> > > accommodated by putting the compat version in the package name itself,
> > > so
> > > that should be doable?
> > 
> > To be honest, as I'm not familiar with Rust at all, I have no idea what
> > you
> > mean here :)
> 
> Ah, sorry... re-reading that paragraph, it sounds very hard to follow. 
> Basically I'm just reiterating what I said above in this email: if Debian
> only has a package for foobar 0.5 (librust-foobar-dev), but xfwl4 requires
> foobar 0.4 or 0.6, it seems there's a way to package all the incompatible
> variants in Debian (e.g. by adding librust-foobar-0.4-dev as a separate
> package).

Ok. Yeah hopefully that's a route we can go through.
> 
> > Yeah, this is (I think) a Debian Rust position rather than a more general
> > Debian position. Still, I'm not in a position to make that policy change,
> > especially considering I have zero experience in Rust or Rust packaging
> > for
> > now :)
> 
> Fair point!
> 
> > >   "Pin your favorite git rev in Cargo.toml" is a perfectly reasonable
> > > approach when considering only the rust/cargo community, but of course
> > > causes problems for distro packagers.
> > 
> > But yeah, that doesn't really work with the distributions models. And I
> > can
> > see that people find the whole distributions with stable releases
> > outdated,
> > but I don't really see how that scales. Someone has to ship binaries to (a
> > lot
> > of) end users and I don't think we have a real alternative yet and I still
> > think distributions (including Debian) are still useful. But maybe that
> > means
> > we (Debian) won't have smithay, and thus won't have xfwl4, and when Xorg
> > is
> > dropped from Debian maybe that means no Xfce at all.
> 
> My expectation would be that smithay will have some stable releases we can
> depend on well before Xorg is dropped from Debian :)  Maybe xfwl4 won't make
> it into forky, but I'd be very surprised if things weren't in shape in time
> for duke.

Ok. I'm honestly not sure about the timing either but I'm fine waiting for
duke if things are OK X11-wide in Debian :)
> 
> > We're not there yet, but if there's resolution in sight for smithay
> > (whether
> > from upstream policy changes or from Debian/Rust policy change) I'm not
> > sure
> > it's worth spending time packaging all the other dependencies, and fixing
> > the
> > other issues.
> 
> Agreed; if packaging from a git rev isn't allowed by policy (or just isn't
> feasible with the existing tools, and no one has the time to change that),
> it probably makes sense to hold off on doing any of this packaging until
> smithay does have a stable release we can depend on.
> 
> > Still, thanks for the detailed analysis, that'll definitely be helpful
> > when we
> > discuss things with Debian Rust maintainers :)
> 
> Sure thing!  I'm curious to hear the outcome.

I'll keep you posted on this once/if things start to move.

Regards,
- -- 
Yves-Alexis
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