#gentoo question for all you beautiful intelligent #gentoo mains out there: is installing rust packages via portage pointless? I installed media-sound/wiremix thinking ooo no new dependencies and it installed a zillion "crates" out of band. or is that probably why the package is masked currently?
EDIT: winning answer: that is normal, but portage will update it at least (among other things)
@aeva At least the crates were being downloaded individually. Many rust ebuilds nowadays will pull a "-deps.tar.xz" tarball with all the crates inside, created by the ebuild author, on a "trust me bro" basis. This is because listing all the crates in each ebuild alongside their hash turned out to bloat the repo size and they want to keep it manageable...
Managing rust deps with portage at least lets it link with some system C libraries like openssl, instead of bundling their own.
@aeva I agree, I'm not blaming anyone just complaining about the status quo... If it were just rust I'd point at them, but between rust, go, node, dotnet, etc there's now a lot of ecosystems with deep dependency trees that are annoying to package, and explode the size of repositories.
This is more of an ecosystem shift, and solutions to deal with it will be necessary. It's the sort of problem that keeps me up at night, as none of the solutions implemented by other distros seem usable in gentoo.
aeva
mid_kid
Fabian Transchel