Pure-Rust Git, no git binary
go-tool-base’s VCS support has two halves that get confused for one. One half talks to forge APIs (GitHub, GitLab) for releases and pull requests. The other talks to the .git directory on disk: clone, history, diff, …
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Rust-Tool-Base
clap's global flag, except in a passthrough subtree
--output json worked everywhere. On the top-level command, on every ordinary subcommand, wherever the user fancied putting it. Then it stopped working in exactly one place, and of course it was the subcommand I’d been …
Secrets that scrub themselves from RAM
A while ago I worked out where a CLI should keep your API key: env var, OS keychain, or, grudgingly, a literal in the config file. That answers where the secret lives. It says nothing about what happens to it once it’s …
Two telemetry events, one mangled line
A line in a log file that no parser would touch. Not a wrong value, not a missing field. Half of one telemetry event spliced into the middle of another, like two people typing into the same text box at once. Which, it …
Errors without an error handler
In the porting post I said go-tool-base’s error handler was one of the bits that didn’t survive the move to Rust, and promised to come back to it. Here’s the come-back. The short version is that Rust hands you, for free, …
forbid means forbid, until linkme needs a word
There’s a line at the top of every production crate in rust-tool-base that I’m quietly proud of: #![forbid(unsafe_code)]. And there are a couple of files that have to say #![allow(unsafe_code)] instead. Not because I …
A framework that contains no unsafe
“It’s written in Rust” gets thrown around as if it were a memory-safety guarantee. It mostly isn’t. Rust is memory-safe by default, which is a wonderful thing, but the unsafe keyword exists precisely so any crate, any …
Waivers with an expiry date
A vulnerability scanner gives you a yes or a no. Is there a known advisory on a path you actually use? Yes, or no. That’s genuinely useful, and you should run one. But it’s a snapshot, taken on the day you ask, and …
A builder that won't compile if you forget a field
go-tool-base configures things with functional options, and if you forget a required one, the best case is a runtime failure and the worst case is an empty value sailing silently into everything downstream. Most builder …
Process isolation won't save you from the filesystem
A test that passed every single time I ran it on its own, and failed maybe one run in five when I ran the whole suite. The failure was always the same: the self-update test downloaded a release archive, went to extract …
