Re: [gentoo-dev] dev-python/cryptography to use rust, effectively killing alpha, hppa, ia64, m68k, s390

[Alessandro Barbieri <lssndrbarbieri@gmail.com>]

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Il Lun 8 Feb 2021, 12:19 Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> ha scritto:

> Hi,
>
> FYI the developers of dev-python/cryptography decided that Rust is going
> to be mandatory for 1.5+ versions.  It's unlikely that they're going to
> provide LTS support or security fixes for the old versions.
>
> Since cryptography is a very important package in the Python ecosystem,
> and it is an indirect dependency of Portage, this means that we will
> probably have to entirely drop support for architectures that are not
> supported by Rust.
>
> According to upstream platform support information [1], this probably
> means (eventually) entirely removing the following architectures:
> - alpha (stable)
> - hppa (stable)
> - ia64 (stable)
> - m68k (exp)
> - s390 (except for s390x, exp)
>
> Furthermore, the Gentoo Rust packages are missing support
> for the following platforms, apparently supported upstream:
> - mips (exp)
> - ppc (32) (stable)
> - sparc (stable)
> - s390x (exp)
> - riscv (stable)
>
> Apparently it's non-trivial to bootstrap Rust on these platforms,
> so it's unclear when Gentoo is going to start providing Rust on them.
>
> I've raised a protest on the cryptography bug tracker [2] but apparently
> upstream considers Rust's 'memory safety' more important than ability to
> actually use the package.
>
> Honestly, I don't think it likely that Rust will gain support for these
> platforms.  This involves a lot of work, starting with writing a new
> LLVM backend and getting it accepted (getting new code into LLVM is very
> hard unless you're doing that on behalf one of the big companies).  You
> can imagine how much effort that involves compared to rewriting the new
> code from Cryptography into C.
>
> If we can't convince upstream, I'm afraid we'll either have to drop
> these architectures entirely or fork Cryptography.
>
>
> [1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/rustc/platform-support.html
> [2] https://github.com/pyca/cryptography/issues/5771
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Michał Górny
>

Should we shed tears for those legacy architectures or move forward? Does
anyone really use them in production?

>

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