for example, I may soon write a bit of CI that ensures that some of our APIs do not pull in any panic machinery. This is fiddly and can depend on the optimizer. That's fine, if the CI breaks on a rust upgrade, it's on me to investigate how to keep our APIs panic-free, the CI did its job!! - ThreadSky

manishearth.bsky.social • 1 day ago

for example, I may soon write a bit of CI that ensures that some of our APIs do not pull in any panic machinery. This is fiddly and can depend on the optimizer. That's fine, if the CI breaks on a rust upgrade, it's on me to investigate how to keep our APIs panic-free, the CI did its job!!

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manishearth.bsky.social•1 day ago

I have in the past had people adamantly claiming that a behavior change on a Unicode repo I maintained (to bring it more in line with the spec!) was a breaking change because their CI broke, and I held the line that no, it wasn't, their CI caught their bad assumptions and *did its job*

manishearth.bsky.social•1 day ago

I think care can and should be taken to make this path smoother, but I do think it is harmful to view all CI breakage as real breakage, and I do not think this is how the Rust project (implicitly) operates right now

(if the Rust project *thinks* it operates that way, I think it is misinformed)

sunshowers.io•1 day ago

I feel like it really depends! Detecting panics via linker shenanigans to me is well in "reasonable to break" territory, while rustup changes are not

manishearth.bsky.social•1 day ago

Sure, that's my point! Nowhere here am I attempting to argue that the rustup change *here* was handled correctly. But I am saying that stability policies are really nuanced and you actually have to spend time coming up with one, not just handwave "we are stable".

manishearth.bsky.social•1 day ago

*and I'm saying* that "don't break CI" does not make a useful stability policy that I think Rust can meaningfully evolve with. You can have a more nuanced thing around what types of CI breakage are okay, but again, you have to spend time coming up with it

manishearth.bsky.social•1 day ago

currently the only tools with an explicit stability policy are clippy and rustc, even cargo doesn't have one, though with cargo there's definitely a generally agreed-upon but unwritten notion of what is and isn't okay at least amongst team members

sunshowers.io•1 day ago

Hard agree

tylermandry.bsky.social•22 hours ago

Good points. I agree that absolutist principles should be avoided and it's case by case. I think breaking "intended usage" is closer to the line I had in mind, rather than whether we can anticipate breakage (as you say, Hyrum's law argues in a sense that all breakage should be anticipated)

manishearth.bsky.social•22 hours ago

yeah, basically, and that requires care in figuring out what the intent is

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