Re: [PATCH RFC 0/3] Introduce Rust and announce that it will become mandatorty

From: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Date: Sep 23, 2025, 05:05 UTC
Message-ID: <aNIqgghQwyWV7Tis@pks.im>
In-Reply-To: <878qi66tyg.fsf@gentoo.org>

On Mon, Sep 22, 2025 at 10:47:03PM +0100, Sam James wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> "brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> writes:
> > I don't think this is going to happen as you anticipate it will.  My
> > original policy was to target Debian stable's release for a year after
> > the new Debian stable came out and that will make using many crates
> > nearly impossible.  We are going to have to be _extremely_ careful about
> > dependencies in general and the things we are likely to use are things
> > like bindgen and cbindgen, where typically an old version will work just
> > fine and which are already packaged in major distros.  We are not going
> > to be adding dependencies willy-nilly and running `cargo update` every
> > other day.
> 
> That brings me significant comfort and I'm glad to hear it. I hope
> others agree with your position on having significant restraint on the
> use of external crates.
> 
> git has always been quite good about dependencies pre-Rust.

I certainly echo brian's sentiment here. Rust dependencies are easy to use, but they are also one part that worries me quite significantly due to multiple reasons:

  - Pulling in many dependencies opens us up for supply chain attacks.

  - Every single dependency is a source for vulnerabilities in general.
    We're already good enough in creating these ourselves.

  - Dependencies may have hard requirements on the Rust version,
    requiring us to bump the minimum required toolchain version.

  - In general, I'm not a fan of having even dozens of dependencies. It
    causes bloat and externalizes a bunch of knowledge.

So I think we should and need to be very conservative about adding any new dependencies. There will be cases where it makes sense, but every new dependency should be well-reasoned.

After this patch series lands, one of the next steps will also be to add a policy for how we want to use Rust in the Git project. brian has already written such a policy (see e.g. [1]), and it already mentions that we'll need to be careful about adding dependencies. Might be worth it to flesh that part out a bit more, but that's something we can discuss at a later point.

Patrick

[1]: <6d065f550fe871cf010409f7bd2a63438cf52723.1756496539.git.gitgitgadget@gmail.com>