[sanderjd]

I think it would be just as easy to package rust programs using OS native package management as anything else, and I'm sure packages will be made for popular things for common package managers. But OS native package managers are a royal pain to use when actively developing on a project that has some dependencies, and bespoke Makefiles are a very imperfect solution.

Flipping your question around a bit: will package manager creators and maintainers ever develop better solutions to the use case of development rather than system administration so that we don't have to keep creating these language-specific tools?

[kibwen]

This is an insightful point. Nix is the only package manager I'm aware of that seems like it could fit the bill: https://nixos.org/nix/

[eddyb]

They already have automated Haskell packages from cabal, it shouldn't be hard to integrate cargo with nix once it's more stable.

You wouldn't even require upstream NixOS packages, just place built cargo packages in the nix store, using it like a cache. Then upstream NixOS channels could start accumulating cargo packages, making cargo dependency "builds" faster.

[sanderjd]

Yeah, nix does look pretty awesome and aware of (even actively designed for )both the system administration and development use cases. If it becomes the native package manager for some popular operating systems, I may have to eat my words about language-specific solutions.

[Sanddancer]

Have you taken a look any at the FreeBSD ports system? It uses makefiles to manage pretty much any software install you can think of. Additionally, there's a pretty good infrastructure there for managing custom build trees, etc. Additionally, they also have things like BSDpan that let you use arbitrary Perl modules with the package management system.

[sanderjd]

I've used ports, but I've never developed a project using it, so maybe I should try that out. But "uses makefiles" does not make me particularly optimistic for its pleasantness. I really prefer (and think it's been proven possible to build) declarative, rather than imperative, systems for managing dependencies.