story
If the plan is to jettison TOML, then it's simply just an odd choice to use for a first cut. And from a purely perception manner, seemingly reaffirms concerns some have had about the bundler team building cargo (right or wrong).
I can see an argument for INI files, but TOML is basically INI with some extensions. And YAML (which has no Rust parser, and nobody who wnats to write one) and JSON (which does have one in the standard library) are very poor configuration formats.
Which one would you have preferred? It seems like a reasonable choice to me.
> And from a purely perception manner, seemingly reaffirms concerns some have had about the bundler team building cargo (right or wrong).
You could just spell out the personnel issues rather than being all FUDdy about it. (I'm friends with Yehuda, but also was room-mates with the current maintainer of Bundler (until very recently). Bundler isn't perfect, but lots of that had to do with people assuming a pre-1.0 project is stable, and upstream bullshit with RubyGems.)
As for the FUDdiness, there was another extensive comment thread here on HN when Cargo was announced. I didn't feel it necessary to re-enumerate all those concerns. And to the best of my recollection, the problems listed were all technical in nature, not personal. For my part, my list was:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7421629
But, I'm hardly alone in being concerned. This is something that will drastically influence the ecosystem. So, it should be met with some level of scrutiny. If it comes out passing muster, great. But that's not going to happen by being glib about things.
Absolutely. Let me make an issue about that: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/46 If he doesn't respond, I will email him.
> As for the FUDdiness...
Thanks! Since the points are enumerated, I can refute them:
> * You can't override a dependency:
You can, in modern Bundlers. But the transitive dependency issue is inherent to Ruby, not Bundler. Cargo will work like npm in this regard, not like bundler.
> Dependencies can disappear on you:
The central repository isn't built yet, but this is very valid. The reason that `gem yank` is still available to everyone is that you'd be surprised how often people push proprietary stuff up to RubyGems. It was removed for a while and caused a significant burden on the RubyGems team.
Regardless, yes, this is a serious consideration.
> It has weird rules:
Totally fair. Let's learn from that and make Cargo not have weird rules. :)
> * It promotes bad practices:
Yup, that's a Rails thing. Rust should be way better, as it doesn't have this kind of issue.
> * It's slow:
This actually has just as much to do with RubyGems as it does Bundler. See all of the presentations Andre has been doing recently, and the bundler-api project.
> * It was designed for MRI:
Quite fair. We only have one Rust implementation so far, but `cargo exec` won't be necessary.
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> So, it should be met with some level of scrutiny.
Absolutely! I don't mean to say "just take this without complaints." But without specific, actionable complaints, it won't get fixed. Please make as many specific, actionable complaints as possible, especially now, pre 1.0.
For what it's worth, I've just been brought on as a maintainer for TOML proper. Tom is still the guy though. Putting aside my involvement with Rust (<3), I also maintain the TOML library for Go, and I want to see an expedient path to 1.0 with minimal breakage. (There are lots of folks in the Go community already using TOML for things, including Mozilla's Heka project and CoreOS's `etcd` project.)
