Gentoo's WD-40: A Profile Feature to Strip Rust From Your System
Description
A screenshot of an embed.ly card from wiki.gentoo.org featuring the purple Gentoo Linux 'g' swirl logo and the heading "WD-40". The text explains: "is a pun name for a feature in Gentoo profiles to disable Rust being built on the system. Some profiles include this by default, such as default/linux/x86/23.0/i486 and default/linux/m68k/23.0 where Rust isn't supported upstream currently. Some users may wish to mask Rust on their profile of choice, this can be done by following the sections below." A teal link reads "Read the article on wiki.gentoo.org >". The humor: WD-40 is the famous penetrating spray used to remove rust from metal, so Gentoo named its mechanism for excluding the Rust toolchain after it - peak distro wordplay, especially relevant on retro architectures (i486, m68k) where LLVM/Rust support doesn't exist and compiling Rust from source is agony
Comments
2Comment deleted
Only Gentoo would ship a degreaser for Rust - everywhere else, once Rust gets into your dependency tree, it's load-bearing
Gentoo found the one Rust dependency you can remove with WD-40 instead of Cargo.