Creating exercises with dependencies

[dabreegster]

@Robinlovelace and I are interested in creating a bunch of exercises to teach people how to use some https://github.com/georust/geo crates. Right now, none of the exercises pull in any external dependencies, and adding the dependencies to Cargo.toml in the repo has no effect -- because that's for the rustlings tool itself. I really quickly dug around to figure out how the tool compiles each exercise and found

rustlings/src/exercise.rs

Line 119 in e06ba1d

Mode::Clippy => {

. It looks like we could write a temporary Cargo.toml file for the exercise to glue in some dependencies. I'm curious if anybody here has thought about doing this before (but didn't spot any issues) and if there's an opinion how to support it, possibly as a hack in a fork of this repo, but ideally as some kind of configuration for sets of exercises. Thanks!

[dabreegster]

#448 may be related

[manyinsects]

Yeah, #448 is related, and this is a longstanding architectural question. Personally, I don't feel like it's very important, because Rustlings is intentionally not about teaching you Cargo, and not about teaching you your editor integration, but if we managed to come up with a satisfactory implementation for this that's not too backwards-incompatible, I'd be open for pulling it in.

[mo8it]

Closing because that should be easy after #1935

About geo exercises, that should be covered by #1936

[Robinlovelace]

Fanastic, many thank!