Rustaceans at the border

Rustaceans at the border

> I would like to see a clear explanation how the maintenance flow would work with stable and long-term kernels and all these editions.

Only the kernel can answer that. C and C++ also have editions and they also are not 100% compatible. Yet kernel contemplates them, anyway.

Rust editions happen every 3 years, their incompatibility is usually pretty limited and there are guide which helps you go from one edition to another.

They are also enabled on the per-crate basis and it's explicitly permittable to link together crates compiled for different editions.

Thus I would assume kernel folks would stick to oldest editions which are used in still supported versions of the kernel. Or maybe would allow use of the new ones in modules which are not support in older kernels.

Frankly, in practice editions are such a minor issue that it's not even worth discussing: yes, these changes are backward-incompatible but they are extremely minor (holf-dozen to dozen changes every three years) and mostly superfluous (as in: code written for the new edition can still be converted to old editions and in very mechanical fashion). A small nuisance instead of a major PITA.

Much more significant are non-edition style changes. These are numerous, happen every six week and while they are backward-compatible people embrace them quickly which means you can not easily backport new versions of important crates to old version of kernel without bumping the used version of rust compiler first.

You are barking on a wrong tree.