Stable versions of source and linux binary differ

help
1

It seems that the stable versions of Rust provided by the Linux binary and the source are different. When I install the Linux binary from the Rust website (or the stable toolchain from multirust) and run the command rustc --version, I get the following output:

rustc 1.0.0 (a59de37e9 2015-05-13) (built 2015-05-14)

However, when compiling the source provided by the Rust website, the version output is this:

rustc 1.0.0-dev (built 2015-05-17)

Are these in fact the same version of Rust, or is the source download a different version of Rust? I've noticed that Rust 1.0.0 provided by both Arch Linux and FreeBSD in the standard repositories have the second version, probably because the package mantainers compiled the package manually rather than using the provided binary. I run Arch as my main distro, and I'd prefer to be able to use Rust as provided by the package manager, but I want to make sure that this is in fact the stable version.

2

This is because of the --release-channel parameter to configure which is dev by default and should probably have been set to release [EDIT: it's actually stable] by the package maintainers.
The only difference I'm aware of is that the dev channel allows using unstable features.

3 Likes
3

Ah, I see. Thanks for the explanation!

4

Small note, the argument to --release-channel should be stable, not release.

1 Like
5

Yeah, I had actually figured that out, I just hadn't know where to look before! (although the configure script really should have been the first place I checked, I'm not sure what I was thinking...)