m0xEE @m0xee@librem.one

It's Wednesday, my dudes! 🐸

According to some sources today also happens to be Capybara Appreciation Day — according to others it's in October.

Stay tuned for interesting developments…

Russian national detained in Osaka for sanction busting: https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/russian-arrested-in-japan-for-illegal-export-of-personal-watercraft/ar-BB1pIqtA

Yes, I only use this as an excuse to post a picture of Ayumu Kasuga 🤭

In Go this wouldn't have been a problem as HTTP client in the standard library honors the environment variables for proxies, but in Rust standard library is very limited — there are plenty of widely used and good crates to make up for it. ureq, which is used in this project, doesn't do it, to me it looks a very similar to Python's great requests module, in which you have to construct the session object (Agent in ureq) and to configure it to use proxies and which is then used to execute requests.

Now I have to figure out how to make ureq in this RSS reader use the proxy set with environmental variables. It looks trivial to accomplish: a matter of implementing the Default trait, which is now derived, for the structure (which would be an object in classic object oriented language) that is used as HTTP client.

Some problems arise from software relying on atomics (thread-safe types) from the standard library, which aren't portable — luckily, there is portable-atomic crate: https://github.com/taiki-e/portable-atomic
Replacing atomics from standard library with the ones from portable-atomic IS straightforward, but in my case it was a dependency of a dependency using it, so building the RSS reader involved adding a [patch.crates-io] section to Cargo.toml to use a local patched version of crate.

In case some of the crates use C code and build something themselves, like ring crate does, you have to point cargo to the right tools using the environment variables, but in a lot of cases it figures everything out on its own.
Also rust crate version 0.16 didn't support 32-bit PowerPC properly so to port TUI RSS reader here https://github.com/veeso/tuifeed I had to update a few dependencies to use newer ring 0.17

It appears that cross-compiling with Rust is rather straightforward: just install the target you're… hmm, targeting with "rutsup target add <target>", and use "cargo build --target <target> --release" — not much harder than it is with Go.
Considering that your target is available via rustup — mine, PowerPC MUSL system wasn't and I had to build natively, I'll figure out how to add my own targets later. But building for my old ARM machine went without a hitch — and, surprisingly, the binary works😂

I have sussexfully updated rust (and cargo) to 1.79 on my PowerPC MUSL machine running Void.
xbps-src makes cross-building software so easy, in absolute most cases you only have to specify the target architecture and here we go — although it fails to produce a working dynamically-linked Python for PowerPC, but it looks like a bug in libffi. In any case you only have to worry about platform-specific workarounds, most of other stuff is done for you — and it just works!

Why the fuck does crates.io require JS and refuses to show any content at all without it?
Requiring a full browser with JS support just to view info on modules is even worse than Go giving you URLs in help messages — it was bad enough, but this… is simply unacceptable! 😩