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Downloading specific betas should be easier
For Firefox, we have a script that kind of duplicates the behavior of rustup and that repacks rust for use on Firefox CI. In some cases, we need to pin a specific beta version, but failed to do so, so when 1.24.0-beta.1 replaced 1.23.0-beta.2 today, we ended up picking that, which, incidentally, broke Firefox CI because 1.24.0-beta.1 apparently breaks slog and servo.
Anyways, after some fiddling, it came out that it's possible to get a specific beta version... if you know when it was released.
That is,
$ rustup toolchain install beta-2017-12-08
installs 1.23.0-beta.2. You have to know that 1.23.0-beta.2 was released on that specific day, or scan all dates.
It would be much easier if it were possible to do:
$ rustup toolchain install 1.23.0-beta.2
which could rely on an hypothetical https://static.rust-lang.org/dist/channel-rust-1.23.0-beta.2.toml file.
To add insult to injury, beta-2020-11-18 is 1.49.0-beta.1 (21dea46d8 2020-11-18), but beta-2020-11-26 is 1.49.0-beta.2 (bd26e4e54 2020-11-24), so you can't even pull the latest beta and get the date from rustc --version.
To be fair to rustup this is a side-effect of the way channels are constructed during builds of rust-lang/rust. If you want to ameliorate this, it may be better to talk with a t-release member about how beta channels are constructed and when, and how making them more predictable might be done.
Are there any tips to figure out the date for a certain beta version, like 1.56.0-beta.3 ?
Sadly, short of having the Rust release process create version numbered beta release manifests, there's not a lot we can do from the Rustup side :/
Sadly, short of having the Rust release process create version numbered beta release manifests, there's not a lot we can do from the Rustup side :/
Is there a place where this change can be proposed and discussed?
The release format described at https://forge.rust-lang.org/infra/channel-layout.html does not seem straightforward to me and it's unsurprising that it's difficult to find toolchains using their identifier. It's unclear to me why toolchains are not simply stored under /dist in directories such as stable-1.60.0+1, beta-1.61.0+2, and nightly-2022.04.14+1 that clearly identify the toolchain. This doesn't omit the date information either because that is present in the manifest.
Thinking more about this, we'd have to add support for the channel names in rustup too, but I've opened a Zulip thread to discuss how this might work.
https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/241545-t-release/topic/version-numbered.20beta.20channels
We discussed this briefly over Zulip and it sounds feasible. I think the next step here is likely to land the code to do this upstream in our release promotion (around https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/src/tools/build-manifest/src/main.rs#L247), and then work with @kinnison to figure out what's necessary to get rustup to support parsing the CLI parameter.
