You seem to be taking a confontational tone, which isn't likely to
encourage a reasonable dialogue.
I've looked for other messages on this, and didn't see any besides this
one explaining why including check_rust() in the checks is a problem.
The problem you talk about here is that it encourages vendoring, which
makes it harder for package authors to count downloads.
To be honest, that doesn't seem like a very serious problem. I assume
the packages ("crates") we are talking about are open source, so this is
entirely in the spirit of how they are allowed to be distributed.
If they aren't open source, then users of those packages should be
warned about that, and a check failure is a good way to do that.
So you need to explain why it is important to be able to download and
install software and not be warned about it.
I am not in R Core or CRAN, but I can suggest why it is better to
include source in the package: it makes the use of that package more
reliable in the future. It's not uncommon to run an R computation that
was written a few years ago. Sometimes libraries or R have changed, and
a user will need to go back to a previous version to reproduce the
calculation. Being able to able to rebuild a system as it would have
been back then is important.
Is that possible if the package needs to make a download? The download
site that worked a few years ago may no longer exist. If the site
exists, the code versions there may be different.
Those are some of the issues that Simon was alluding to.
Duncan Murdoch
On 2025-03-02 5:45 a.m., Mossa Merhi Reimert via R-devel wrote:
Dear Simon Urbanek,
There has been very little engagement with the issue I referred to. If it was
decided that this “check” ought to be part of the default checks for R,
then that could have been written to us. Either on the bugs.r-project.org or
the proposed patch. Before we talk about anything else,
it does seem very strange that we cannot get a reasonable dialogue going.
I would like to say that the R/Rust community has grown substantially. From my
end, there are 3 bindings project, extendr, savvy, and roxido.
Then, there are now many rust-based packages on CRAN, see this most recent
compiled list https://github.com/nanxstats/r-rust-pkgs.
There is also proof-of-concept https://github.com/r-rust/hellorust that
integrates `cargo`, rust’s official build system, with R’s package build system,
and https://github.com/extendr/hellorustc, which showcases how Rust compiler
could be directly linked with R’s package system.
Let me say, that the current R CMD check is not meant to be “helpful”. When a
package is built, `cargo` tells the user “Downloading crates”.
Thus, this information is already conveyed to the user.
Personally, I do wish we could debate this requirement further. I do not
believe that having R-packages on CRAN vendor rust dependencies
as a good policy. Download statistics is a success metric of a given r-package
and rust packages. By insisting on vendoring, and thus
side-stepping `cargo` / crates.io, we are robbing upstream authors of their
download-numbers. I do not think such policy is honourable.
While C/C++ do not have official package repositories, it could be thought of,
as fair game, to have CRAN act as a pseudo package manager for C/C++ libraries.
I’m not going to argue for or against this part.
There are many objections from the CRAN side to all things related to Rust. I
don’t want to open multiple topics in the same thread.
But there is plenty to bring up. And I had hoped we could talk this little
issue through, before embarking on a larger discussion.
I do not appreciate the “random demands” comment, as this is not a demand, nor
is it random.
I have inquired my end of the community for suggestions
to compile a larger proposal, but then I was afraid that this would be
perceived as a big, bulky demand.
Rust is not C/C++/Java, and the support for Rust cannot look like the support
for these languages.
From: Simon Urbanek <simon.urba...@r-project.org>
Date: Sunday, 2 March 2025 at 00.39
To: Mossa Merhi Reimert <mo...@sund.ku.dk>
Cc: r-devel@r-project.org <r-devel@r-project.org>
Subject: Re: [Rd] R CMD check and CRAN's Rust policy
[Du får ikke ofte mails fra simon.urba...@r-project.org. Få mere at vide om,
hvorfor dette er vigtigt, på https://aka.ms/LearnAboutSenderIdentification ]
Mossa,
the issue you cite is lacking any pertinent information and it's not even clear why it
should be an issue. The check is perfectly justified, it just reports whether a package
using rust declares this correctly and where it downloads 3rd party content - something
that is important to R users in general and not related to CRAN. I don't see how any of
this is "prohibitive" it just calls out what the package is already doing.
As discussed before, my hope was that the "R"ust community will mature enough to work on
proper support. It is not clear that it happened yet, but once it does it would make sense to talk
about support just as we have for C, C++ and Java, so certainly that should be the right
discussion. However, it will have to start with some thinking and a proposal on how the associated
issues (compiler support, versioning, dependency sources etc.) are to be addressed, as opposed to
making random demands. All this has nothing to do with CRAN so the issue you mention seems
irrelevant to the progress. Also I'd like to know what are the "challenges embedded in R
itself".
Cheers,
Simon
On Mar 2, 2025, at 8:45 AM, Mossa Merhi Reimert via R-devel
<r-devel@r-project.org> wrote:
Hello everyone!
I'm Mossa, I'm one of the maintainers of extendr, an automated generation of
bindings project for
Rust code, for use in R-packages.
I'm writing to you, as R 4.4.3 was just released, and there have not been
follow-up on an issue important to us. Link to the issue as discussed on r-devel
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2024-October/083666.html
A community member has provided a suggestion to a patch here
https://github.com/r-devel/r-svn/pull/182, and we have also attempted to bring
it up on
Bugzilla: https://bugs.r-project.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18806
TLDR: Default `R CMD check` uses additional CRAN-specific checks for Rust,
instead of keeping this behind the --as-cran flag.
I would like to say, that there is a growing interest in Rust within the R
community.
And generally, Rust becoming a widely adopted language within the Python
community (including the scientific part of that community). It is time to deal
with the
pain points with using Rust in R.
Therefore, I would kindly ask that we have a dialogue on how to remedy the
issue above first, and how we may deal with other issues going forward. There
are both challenges embedded in R itself, and the current CRAN policy for Rust
is prohibitive.
Mossa Merhi Reimert
Postdoctoral Researcher
K�benhavns Universitet
Department of Veterinary and Animal Sciences
Animal Welfare and Disease Control
Gr�nneg�rdsvej 8
1870 Frederiksberg C
Denmark
+45 35324135
mo...@sund.ku.dk<mailto:mo...@sund.ku.dk>
[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
