Xtask #2688

egithinji · 2025-03-03T07:17:16Z

Background

Comprehensive Rust requires a number of tools to be installed (e.g. mdbook and mdbook-course). As mentioned in #2509 (and discussed in #2469) it would be nice to have a cross platform command for installing these dependencies. Currently these are installed using a shell script (install-mdbook.sh) but this isn't truly cross platform e.g. for Windows users.

Xtask

xtask outlines an approach for automating tasks in a Rust project. It involves using cargo's aliasing feature to allow us to run commands like cargo xtask <some task> to perform adhoc tasks via a Rust binary that we might otherwise need a shell script for.

In this PR we add support for a cargo xtask install-tools command that will replace the install-mdbook.sh script and install the dependent tools. We can potentially extend it to support for other tasks e.g. cargo xtask fmt.

This follows the approach in https://github.com/matklad/cargo-xtask and allow us to run `cargo xtask install-tools` from the project root to install the tools that comprehensive rust depends on, rather than using a bash script which is not truly cross platform.

Cargo.lock

xtask/src/main.rs

michael-kerscher · 2025-03-03T09:26:22Z

Hi @egithinji. Thank you very much for drafting this pull request! I really like the idea of having this cross platform task execution tool!
I can already think of an additional use case for this. We have a test framework that is testing the generated website and currently needs to be executed manually in the tests subdirectory. Maybe it makes sense to include such tasks as well (not in this PR though, this is a idea for future work)

egithinji · 2025-03-04T19:33:15Z

Hi @egithinji. Thank you very much for drafting this pull request! I really like the idea of having this cross platform task execution tool! I can already think of an additional use case for this. We have a test framework that is testing the generated website and currently needs to be executed manually in the tests subdirectory. Maybe it makes sense to include such tasks as well (not in this PR though, this is a idea for future work)

Thanks @michael-kerscher for reviewing! Yes that sounds like a good candidate for an additional task. Happy to collaborate on this further.

xtask/src/main.rs

michael-kerscher

looks good to me now

Eric Githinji added 3 commits March 3, 2025 06:59

Remove shell script and update README.

eeffce0

Format with dprint.

2cafbcd

michael-kerscher reviewed Mar 3, 2025

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michael-kerscher reviewed Mar 3, 2025

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