How to bootstrap?

[wongandj]

I'm packaging hypher for Guix (a source-based distro similar to Nix) as part of a larger project to package Typst, and part of our packaging guidelines is to avoid packaging "opaque" binaries if possible. In service of that, I've been trying to find a way to generate the files in the ./tries directory.

The naive answer is to spot the ./tests/generate.rs file and try running cargo test (from a git checkout, as the cargo release is missing ./patterns) but it seems that without the pre-existing binaries, hypher doesn't compile, so generate.rs can't be run. I read in #1 that this choice was made because the process requires human intervention(?), which is understandable, but would you be able to describe your process in detail, so that it can be replicated for Guix?

[wongandj]

Looking into it further, I've found a hacky way to do it: by running cargo test --test generate --no-default-features, the test can re-generate the tries without using them, though the test does return a failure if the old tries aren't there to be replaced. Would this be considered a bug?

[laurmaedje]

The codegen was changed from a different setup to the tests-based one after the binaries were generated. That's why it's sort of broken and can't be bootstrapped well. I would consider this a bug, though I like the test-based setup in principle as it makes it easy to ensure the files are fresh.

[Enivex]

You don't actually need the old tries there. The files can be empty, they just need to exist before you can do cargo test --test generate.

(I'm too clueless about rust to figure out the reason.)