Rust

There are two ways to install Rust. This article explains how they differ and which one should be used, according to users’ needs.

Rust can be obtained by:

• Installing the rustup package, then installing any Rust target and/or tool using rustup itself
• Installing the rust package

Users should prefer the rustup way, since it gives the freedom to install any tools and targets, including nightly versions and debugging utilities, although it may require editing the PATH variable depending on your shell setup. According to the official Rust installation guide:

It is customary for Rust developers to include ~/.cargo/bin in their PATH environment variable. During installation rustup will attempt to configure the PATH. Because of differences between platforms, command shells, and bugs in rustup, the modifications to PATH may not take effect until the console is restarted, or the user is logged out, or it may not succeed at all.

The rust package, in fact, is present in the Solus repository for building packages that depend on it and it is not intended to be used by the final user, although it is possible and supported. Users that want to use the rust package for their projects will be limited to the targets and tools that Solus needs to support, namely x86_64 and i686 Linux targets and cargo. On the other hand, the rust package is ready to use after its installation with no extra configurations.

Either way, it is also recommended to install our system.devel component, which is typically required for compiling. See our documentation for it here.

As a final note, it is possible to configure rustup to use the system toolchain. This setup is discouraged unless aimed at developing applications targeting Solus itself.