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Comment by seren | Hacker News Reader

I have a small question : I have installed 1.4 through rustup.sh.

What is the clean way to upgrade to 1.5 ? I don't think there is some kind of 'rustup.sh upgrade' Delete 1.4 & reinstall ? Or downloading rustup 1.5 will apply a clean install on the existing one ?

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Run rustup.sh again, and it will Just Work. (If not, that's a bug.) If you want to have multiple versions installed at the same time, https://github.com/brson/multirust is super cool.

Generally speaking, installation is something we're working on: working with Linux package maintainers, rolling rustup and multirust together and making them work well cross-platform, etc.

It's also easy to have multiple versions installed using nix.

Any plans to offer official Rust Docker images?

Or is this it? https://hub.docker.com/r/jimmycuadra/rust/

There aren't any plans at the moment, no.

What benefit would Docker images have over the existing upstream distribution or distro packaging? The Rust compiler doesn't have any particularly complicated dependencies, either installing the binaries directly from rust-lang.org or installing packages from your distro (if your distro has packages yet) should work fine.

Container images are great for daemons with possibly complicated dependency sets that might have conflicting version requirements with other packages and can benefit from isolation from other packages that containerization gives, but seem like a pretty heavyweight solution for just installing a compiler.

One benefit: one could install latest version of Rust on any distribution. Debian stable for instance usually lags behind (with good reason, but still...). I imagine it is mostly useful for checking out Rust though, not for normal use.

The installer from https://www.rust-lang.org works fine on Debian stable. Right now, you can just use the upstream rustup.sh script for platforms that don't yet have it packaged (like Debian stable), or install from your distro for those that do (or use rustup.sh on those as well if you like).

What I'm not seeing is the value of a Docker image. Rust doesn't have much in the way of runtime dependencies, which is where the value of a container generally comes in. I don't know of a platform where Docker image would work but rustup.sh would not.

I'd attribute it to IMO bad devops habits encouraged by Docker. It's too easy in Docker to depend on someone's unofficial image ("FROM rustxyz" vs. "FROM debian + download deps + install rust"). Having official images would at least reduce the number of people building their infrastructure on unverified/unofficial images.

So you think running some script on my machine is preferable to running a container? If I don't like having Rust around, with containers I can just remove it. With script - yeah, maybe, with some digging for correct parameters and assuming it cleans up after itself properly (which is far from trivial).

Packages are of course preferable if available and up-to-date.

rustup.sh has an --uninstall flag that should remove everything cleanly.

Should. It wouldn't be the first script to have a bug.

A few reasons:

- It is common for languages to have official Docker images (Java, Ruby, Python, Go, Erlang, Haskell, Julia, etc)

- In August the install process didn't work on my Debian system, eventually got guidance for workarounds from IRC

- Our build farm is docker based, application deployment environment is docker based

- Ensures development environments are identical

- Solves the multiple compiler issue

As much as I use Docker, it'd be tough for me to call it heavyweight. In terms of resource consumption Docker is just a neat wrapper over some functionality that is built in to the kernel, there is no "vm" of any sort, which is a common misconception.

Strongly recommend multirust. It can eat a bit of space if you end up with both stable, beta and nightly installed (but that can still be a good idea -- obviously lots of new projects will experiment with some new features). But multirust takes a lot of cues from other similar tools for sandboxing. I just did:

   $ multirust update
   $ multirust show-default
   multirust: default toolchain: stable
   multirust: default location: (...)

   rustc 1.5.0 (3d7cd77e4 2015-12-04)
   cargo 0.6.0-nightly (e1ed995 2015-10-22)

   $ multirust list-toolchains
   beta
   nightly
   stable

   $ du -hs ~/.multirust/
   996M    /home/e12e/.multirust/

Also worth noting is multirust-rs, a reimplementation of multirust in Rust, which notably adds Windows support. I haven't tried anything fancy with it yet but so far it just works.

https://github.com/Diggsey/multirust-rs

The intention is to unify this, multirust, and rustup.sh. It will probably just be branded "rustup."

Thank you so much for posting this. I was expecting something like this to pop but never tried searching.

rustup.sh is really freaking awesome. I was shocked at how insane it is to set up Go when I peeped at my friend installing it.

Never heard of programming but you still want to compile a project?

Step 1: run rustup.sh (curl -sSf https://static.rust-lang.org/rustup.sh | sh)

Step 2: clone the repo of the project or your regional equivalent

Step 3: cargo build --release (or now with the new cargo install feature, cargo install)

Step 4: Enjoy

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