Clarify that beta builds can be picked up by version

[apiraino]

Closes #992

cc: @Skgland does it read better now?

Thanks

Rendered

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[Skgland]

LGTM.
Though the second sentence, about picking a beta by date, could be removed, in my opinion, but if you want to keep that in that's also fine.

[apiraino]

LGTM. Though the second sentence, about picking a beta by date, could be removed, in my opinion, but if you want to keep that in that's also fine.

Ok, thanks! I thought to leave that as second option but I'm fine as well with removing it. I'll leave to the reviewer to figure out :)

[cuviper]

I didn't know this was possible, and I can't find an example where it has been used. Do you have any citations?

[Skgland]

I didn't know this was possible, and I can't find an example where it has been used. Do you have any citations?

This wasn't possible for a long time. Only since 1.75-beta does the release process generate the necessary channel files¹ and only in rustup 1.28.0 has the support been added to rustup to use those channel files².

I don't have any citations of this having been used. Given that most crater runs are master compared to PR or beta crater runs following the current instructions that is somewhat expected.

I did intend to try it myself, but forgot to do that, sorry. I did look at the crater and rustwide source and if the toolchain isn't a sha hash it should end up at https://docs.rs/rustwide/latest/rustwide/toolchain/struct.Toolchain.html#method.dist³ which claims to support all rustup toolchain names and rustup toolchain install 1.81.0-beta.1 works.

Dist toolchains are all the toolchains available through rustup and distributed from static.rust-lang.org. You need to provide the toolchain name (the same you’d use to install that toolchain with rustup).

https://docs.rs/rustwide/latest/src/rustwide/toolchain.rs.html#43-58

As long as the rustup version used by crater/rsutwide is at least 1.28.0 this should work.

Crater is currently on rustwide version 0.19.3⁴, and rustwide should update rustup automatically (except in rustwide 0.19.1⁵)

Edit: in the meantime I have tested using the crater cli and using 1.95.0-beta.3 worked.

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/117191 ↩

2. https://github.com/rust-lang/rustup/pull/3858 ↩

3. https://github.com/rust-lang/crater/blob/master/src/toolchain.rs#L147 ↩

4. https://github.com/rust-lang/crater/blob/master/Cargo.toml#L51 ↩

5. https://github.com/rust-lang/rustwide/blob/33239ddecb7c57de7408b7a7a489d7d04019205d/CHANGELOG.md?plain=1#L51-L56 ↩

[cuviper]

I'm running crater for 1.95 in rust-lang/rust#153551 -- when that inevitably needs retries, I'll try using the new suggestion here and see how it goes.