search

dcuddeback / termios-rs

Safe bindings for the termios library.
http://dcuddeback.github.io/termios-rs/termios/
MIT License
75 stars 25 forks source link

Deprecate in favor of nix #12

Closed Susurrus closed 7 years ago

Susurrus commented 7 years ago

The new nix 0.9 release includes a new termios API that covers the same functionality provided by this crate. Depending on your workload, it might be worth deprecating this crate and stating that people should use nix directly instead.

conradkleinespel commented 7 years ago

I don't think the 2 crates can be compared. nix is a huge beast, powerful but also difficult to audit. termios-rs on the other hand is less powerful but easy to audit because of its small size.

Seems like both use MIT licensing though, so that would make deprecation easy.

conradkleinespel commented 7 years ago

I've just noticed that libc now includes all of termios-rs and it's unit testing for a lot of different OSes. For instance, for TCSANOW, see: https://github.com/rust-lang/libc/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=TCSANOW&type=

This is nix uses under the hood, I believe.

Susurrus commented 7 years ago

@conradkdotcom Yes, I finished adding support for the termios API to nix (which included pushing all FFI declarations into libc) because I wanted to have solid cross-platform support for it. The CI story for both libc and nix are both very good. Additionally nix aims to support all POSIX platforms also supported by libc (see the README for platform support promises).

I don't think the 2 crates can be compared. nix is a huge beast, powerful but also difficult to audit. termios-rs on the other hand is less powerful but easy to audit because of its small size.

nix is a bunch of disparate APIs that share very little code, so I don't think yours is an appropriate characterization. If you look at the code for the termios API you'll actually see it only builds on 3 datatypes defined by nix: Pid, Result, and Error. Auditing this codebase should be no more onerous than that of termios-rs given that tokei reports the LoC for both projects' APIs to be very similar.

dcuddeback commented 7 years ago

I don't see any reason to deprecate termios-rs. It requires very little maintenance and has fewer dependencies than nix, which some people might prefer.

Some developers (such as myself) consider the cost (in terms of complexity and maintenance) before adding a dependency to a project. For those developers, less is more, and termios-rs offers a simple API that's focused on a single piece of POSIX functionality and has only libc as a dependency. Some developers see dependencies as a near-zero cost to their project. For them (or in some circumstances such as prototyping), the extra surface area and transitive dependencies of nix might not be a big deal.

It's nice to have choices.

@conradkdotcom Thanks for pointing out that libc has the termios definitions now. I may actually switch serial-rs to use that instead to reduce dependencies.