EPEL-ANNOUNCE Upcoming removal of rust2rpm + major Rust packaging toolchain update for EPEL 9

Hello EPEL packagers, The latest version of the Rust packaging toolchain will soon be available for EPEL 9 (i.e. rust2rpm v24, rust-packaging v24, and cargo2rpm v0.1). This is a major upgrade from rust2rpm v21 which is currently in EPEL 9, but also comes with the drawback that it now requires Python >= 3.10. However, I have split the Rust packaging tools into three separate projects (previously everything was in a monorepo) to make packaging them easier: The two components which are needed at build-time (RPM macros + the cargo2rpm Python module that powers them) can still be built for EPEL 9, as cargo2rpm has no third-party dependencies and only needs Python that is available. The spec generator (rust2rpm) has also been split off from rust-packaging into a separate package, which will *not* be available on EPEL 9. rust2rpm requires Python >= 3.10, but it also has a few non-trivial third-party dependencies (most notably, jinja2). Since most Rust packagers primarily work on Fedora, I don't think the effort of packaging all missing dependencies for Python 3.11 just to make /usr/bin/rust2rpm available for EPEL 9 would be worth it. There are three Pull Requests which will implement this update: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/cargo2rpm/pull-request/1 https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/rust-packaging/pull-request/6 https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/epel-rpm-macros/pull-request/65 (kudos to @gotmax23!) These changes (i.e. rust-packaging v24 + cargo2rpm) have now been live in "production" in Fedora for over a week, and based on user and CI feedback, I expect these updates to cause no regressions on EPEL 9. Fabio