Thanks! We do force push this file when releasing. Not sure if it is worth it for dev

Feel free to close if you think it's not worth it. I think it is rather important to be able to reproduce the exact state in which the library was tested.
One example that can be unpleasant without a Cargo.lock is if one needs to find the point at which a regression was introduced. Dependencies that do accidentally introduce breaking changes in a patch version can make git bisect painful. It's not sufficient, granted, as one would also have to track the compiler version, but it's one step towards making it more automated.

#1842 intends to add clap as a dependency. clap tends to be quite heavyweight, but without checking out and building the PR locally to get the Cargo.lock it is hard to judge what the cost in terms of dependencies is. If the Cargo.lock were checked in, it would be more convenient to judge the cost vs benefit during regular code review.

I am not super on point with pros + cons but will ask for advice internally!

@ArthurZucker Having the lockfile in tree is super cumbersome. Basicaly every PR will have changes to this file, usually leading to conflicts.

The rust code it's pretty standard to not commit the lockfile. The documentation recommended for a long time to purely ignore it. They changed that because some projects started to behave differently: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2023/08/29/committing-lockfiles/

Honestly I feel for tokenizers it's just much better to ignore the lockfile most of the time. Tokenizers is a library, we shouldn't have anything to say about pinning versions (because that's what our users will see anyway).

For the python library it's slightly different since the library is embedded in the Python wheel. There for vendoring reasons it's nicer to provide the Cargo.lock so users can recompile and verify that they produce the same binary, it's great to avoid some types of depency chain attacks.

That's why there is the current setup. You are free to change that, but the caveat will be much more "useless" code modifications and merge conflicts when merging PRs (which tend to happen in bulk here so not really practical).

Sorry for the response delay.

I've simulated what the changes would be if this PR were to be accepted. If the lockfile were tracked, of the last 15 commits on the main branch, only the PRs related to #1834 would have resulted in changes to the lockfile, and these were later reverted. This seems statistically on par with the larger history of the repo, having 133 commits (7%) touching Cargo.toml which roughly corresponds with changes to the lockfile, unless one has Dependabot that sends PRs for every patch update. Translated into PRs, of the last 11 there was one that changed the lock file.