Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC v2 5/7] BreakingChanges: announce Rust becoming mandatory

From: Phillip Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2025 15:22:42 +0100

On 05/09/2025 13:45, Matthias Aßhauer wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Sep 2025, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:
> 
>> ++
>> +The Git project will declare the last version before Git 3.0 to be a 
>> long-term
>> +support release that is maintained until alternate Rust backends like 
>> gcc-rs are
>> +able to build Git. The Git project may need to rely on distributions 
>> to help
> 
> Do we want to commit to promising support until gccrs is ready? What if 
> gccrs ends up abandoned? Or takes an unexpectedly long time to reach a 
> stage where it can build Git? It might make sense to give this LTS 
> release a time limit instead, or in addidtion.

Yes, this feels way too open ended. I think we need to be realistic 
about how long we can offer security updates for an LTS version. A lot 
of the security updates are written by developers at companies that have 
very little or no commercial interest in platforms that don't support 
rust. While those companies do have an interest in helping to keep the 
wider ecosystem secure it is hard to see them funding security work on 
niche systems indefinitely. Giving platforms without a rust compiler two 
or three years to either port rust or prepare to take on the work of 
security updates for their platform themselves seems like a more 
realistic balance to me.

Thanks

Phillip