[Question] Update Cargo Dependencies?

[kevinmatthes]

Since there had been an update to sysexits in the last days, I wondered whether it would be a meaningful enhancement to update all dependency crates to their latest versions.

[kevinmatthes]

sysexits, version 0.2.2, runs stable; see https://github.com/kevinmatthes/cargo-optimise.

[wert007]

Since there are not really any changes in that update, and it is only a kind of "patch" update, this is not really necessary. 😅

[kevinmatthes]

It was a more general question with sysexits as an example. To preview the crates which have been updated, just delete the Cargo.lock and run cargo b once. This will recreate the file and automatically update the changed crates. To fetch their names comfortably, run git diff -U1 | grep name. On my machine, this gives:

 name = "autocfg"
 name = "libc"
 name = "num-integer"
 name = "num-traits"
 name = "sysexits"

There is also a GitHub feature named "Dependabot" which would automatically update the crates when required. How about this? It would correlate with #8.

[wert007]

Since I just removed getopts as dependency in a pull request, I think most of these should be resolved anyway.

[kevinmatthes]

In fact, just two updates could be omitted by doing so. num-integer, num-traits and especially sysexits still need to be updated. The first two crates originate from chrono; sysexits is quite likely to receive an important feature update within the next two weeks, I suppose.

The feature update brings the Display trait implementation in order to format the exit codes to strings which will definitely benefit the error handling, not only for debugging. We could add the information with which exit code the application aborts to the error messages, for example.

[wert007]

Hmm, I think status codes are not too helpful to end users. If they are interested in them, they have a terminal, which will show that code to them. Otherwise the program should just use clear language to describe what exactly went wrong.