ostree oxidation: internal components written in Rust

[Luca BRUNO <lucab lucabruno net>]

Hi all,
This is a followup to a discussion which started on this Github PR:
https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree/pull/1785#issuecomment-445966398

ostree currently ships some internal components written in Rust,
which can be opted-in at configure time[0].

I've recently seen an increasing interest around using Rust in
Gnome-land, and I think there are a few ostree pieces which could
be good targets for that as well.

However the current approach of maintaining parallel (C and Rust)
implementations of everything is not very appealing.
There are precedents of related projects (rpm-ostree[1] and librsvg[2])
which are now hard-requiring a rustc+cargo toolchain, which would help
reducing the configuration matrix.

What would be the general (developers, maintainers, and users) feedback
to proposing a similar move for ostree? Would it be feasible in the
near future to unconditionally required `--enable-rust` (and to drop
the configuration option)?
 
[0] https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree/tree/v2018.9/rust
[1] https://github.com/projectatomic/rpm-ostree/pull/1509
[2] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2017-January/msg00001.html

Ciao, Luca

-- 
"If you build a wall, think of what you leave outside it" - Italo Calvino