Should people just use goreleaser (or cargo-dist, or many others) instead of this action?

[autarch]

Recently, I was considering adding some features to this action, notably adding the ability to produce signed releases (specifically, signing the checksums file). As I started looking into this, I realized that goreleaser already does this, as well as many other things this action doesn't do:

• It offers a lot more power and flexibility in what is included in the resulting release archive files.
  • This includes templating files, so for example you can update the copyright year in the LICENSE file to match the release date.
• Deb, RPM, macOS DMG, MSI, Chocolatey, etc. support.
• Integration with SBOM creation tools.
• And more

So I'm wondering whether it's worth continuing to invest in this action. It seems like using goreleaser to release a Rust project is fairly easy. It even supports building, though I think for that I'd still use my actions-rust-cross action, as I don't think goreleaser would make it easier to do cross-platform builds.

Will people who use this action see this issue? If you do, I'd greatly appreciate your feedback! Take a look at goreleaser, focusing specifically on the parts related to releasing, not building. After looking, do you still prefer this actions? If so, why?

[autarch]

Discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1ir4l9f/should_people_just_use_goreleaser_instead_of/

From a comment I wrote there:

For those following along, I should've done a little more homework on this. I was experimenting a bit with switching one of my projects to Goreleaser, and I realized that support for prebuilt binaries is a paid feature. So since I'm not keen on redoing my entire build process (which already works just fine), I think Goreleaser is out of the running.

I'll take a closer look at cargo-dist now too.

The general spirit of my question remains, though. Should I continue to develop actions-rust-release or not?

And for further follow-up, from reading the cargo-dist docs, I couldn't find anything about not handling the build as well. Sigh.

[bvaisvil]

I'm still in the process of getting this action working on my repo, but I think there is value in maintaining a rust-focused release action.

[autarch]

Like I said in my blog post, there's almost nothing in this action that is actually rust-specific. However, I realized that for the use case I want, where the release tool just handles release, not compilation, this is only supported by the paid version of goreleaser. I need to survey other tools more thoroughly and decide if I want to use one of those or write my own.

[autarch]

Ok, I didn't say that here or in my action, but I should have. The only Rust-specific thing this action does is look for the compiled binary under target.