​​CLI WG – Berlin
​​

​​What’s up and what to work on with other teams

  • ​​Survey results!
  • ​​Spoiler: Over 1k responses!
  • ​​Cargo features
  • ​​templates
  • ​​Lang features
  • ​​finalize ?​ in main

​​Discussions & Design

  • ​​config handling: files etc
  • ​​crate to handle integration tests
  • ​​(@epage not on site)

​​Survey results notes

  • ​​A strong majority have written CLI apps in Rust
  • ​​Crate usage
  • ​​Dominating crates:
  • ​​Clap/structopt
  • ​​Logging
  • ​​Otherwise, fairly standard Rust deps

​​Distribution

​​learnings from cargo debian guidelines
  • ​​crates.io helpers
  • ​​minimal closure of deps you need
  • ​​idea: package multiple semver incompat version at the same time, don't package multiple semver compat version at the same time
  • ​​package name and version in .so file, like libclap2, libclap3
  • ​​do other distros follow suite?
  • ​​crates.io could help figure out minimal set of versions to minimize set of versions
  • ​​discourage non-^​ deps on crates.io
  • ​​document some common guidelines
  • ​​pls use ^​ deps
  • ​​pls don’t bump required rustc version in minor releases
  • ​​apps vs libraries
  • ​​reverse deps only track published crates, which are mostly libraries
  • ​​detect sys libs (pkg-config)
  • ​​can we give a better experience then “pls install x, y, z beforehand”
  • ​​requires metadata, see metadeps for pkg-config data
  • ​​find best practice: how to deal with native deps in the context of distribution?
  • ​​first step: have distros/packagers figure it out
  • ​​general best practices: don’t depend on network during build, follow good practices for native deps
  • ​​extend cargo install?
  • ​​pascal: oh god no
  • ​​others: man pages, shell autocompletions not so horrible (pascal agrees)
  • ​​build-time generation of those files, e.g. autogenerated by clap
  • ​​maybe do it incrementally with unstable-feature flag/opt-in
  • ​​build.rs could emit a list of files for specific categories
  • ​​helper crates/cargo subcommands to take care of these files
  • ​​custom cargo-subcommands to unify build tools? template? generate an install.rs?