"Legacy" tier 2 targets have misplaced or absent maintainer docs · Issue #113739 · rust-lang/rust (original) (raw)

Location

This affects our platform support documentation.

It specifically affects targets added before the target tier policy was confirmed, and especially those that are tier 2.

Summary

It is widely expected that the existing tier 1 targets are of primary concern for the Rust Project in general. As I understand it, the current absence of formally documented maintainers for them is based on the belief we have a large enough surplus of "target maintainers" for them that we can expect these targets to be effectively supported by "whoever picks up the slack".

However, tier 2 targets are trickier. Many are more niche, harder to find and run code on, and require specialized developer knowledge. These realities are part of why we expect targets to have target maintainers. Yet we have several without any documented support because they predate the target tier policy. This has recently led to us being forced to respond to exigent circumstances by interrupting our usual support because they implicitly violated the other side of the target support "contract": they impeded development of all the rest of our targets to a degree we cannot accept, with little other recourse.

This is a very bad situation. It is also a bad situation we can attempt to reduce recurrence of. Easily, in fact. Some of our targets have informally known target maintainers but we just... haven't written them down. Actually writing down who is invested in these targets in the same way other maintainers are listed would help reduce the need for guessing when responding in future high-priority situations where failure to act could stall-out work.

We should formally document target maintainers for the following tier 2 targets on the now-common platform support documentation pages. Technically this concern applies somewhat even to tier 3 targets as well but those should be handled in a separate issue as they are quite literally a separate priority level, and because tier 2 targets are unique in having potential to move to both tier 1 and tier 3. We may need to reduce our asserted support level for some of these targets. We also might like to raise our support level for others, without having to maintain our existing assumptions of having essentially infinite "slack" for them.

Tier 2 with Host Tools

Tier 2