The State of Rust in MacPorts Today

[Herby G]

Hello all,

Right now, Rust in MacPorts is severely out of date. It's about 5 versions
behind the current release, which at the moment is at 1.65.0. In
comparison, MacPorts Rust is currently at 1.61.0.

As a core language underlying a lot of other ports, many of these ports
cannot be updated to their latest versions because these versions require
current versions of Rust. At the time of this writing, 156 ports are being
built using Rust ( https://ports.macports.org/port/rust/details/ ), some
quite heavily used by the community, including projects like `git-delta`,
`bat` and `fd`.

MarcusCalhoun-Lopez's PR here (
https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/14277 ) heavily rewrote the
Rust port to run on older systems, and was very much celebrated and
endorsed. However, as a result of this PR, the Rust port became a lot more
complicated, and also introduced a new critical bootstrap compiler
(referenced in the Rust portgroup here:
https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/blob/2d39b30a32fcf0f5e1cff04f172e9d55ae08ba48/_resources/port1.0/group/rust-1.0.tcl#L140),
which is being hosted in MarcusCalhoun-Lopez's personal Github account (
https://github.com/MarcusCalhoun-Lopez/rust/releases ).  Marcus did try to
ask about a more official location to host the bootstrap compiler in a
macports-dev thread:
https://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2022-April/044243.html ,
but ultimately per the  responses he decided to just host it in his
personal account himself.

Since this massive change to the Rust port at 1.60.0, it's only seen one
update since then to 1.61.0 (
https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/commit/8431ccb48eec4824736eca51f643523356091cd6
)

David Gilman opened a PR recently attempting to update Rust to 1.64.0 (
https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/16329 ), but Gilman doesn't
have access to update the bootstrap compiler, because as of right now, only
MarcusCalhoun-Lopez knows how to build it, and also it's hosted in
Calhoun's Github account as mentioned prior.

We need to figure out a more sustainable approach for this bootstrap
compiler, including how it can be built, and hosting it somewhere where a
small set of MacPorts maintainers can build and update it so that we can
get MacPorts Rust back on track.  As things are today, only
MarcusCalhoun-Lopez has all the pieces required to update this port, and
there's been no word from him for months now as the Rust port has fallen
further and further behind. Being such a critical core language port, it
may make sense to create a repo within the MacPorts Github organization
where a set of maintainers can host and update the Rust bootstrap compiler.
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