Deprecate replace?

[nrc]

I don't see any good reason to have replace and patch and it is confusing that we have two features that do the same thing in subtly different ways.

[nrc]

We'd obviously take a long time to deprecate and probably can't remove the feature until the next edition.

[alexcrichton]

Generous 👍 from me, this was always the initial intention but we never got around to doing it. I'd be game to do this at any time!

[est31]

I can vaguely recall replace having some capabilities that patch doesn't but can't remember any specifics.

[ehuss]

The primary problem with [patch] that I'm aware of is that you cannot target different versions (#6169) whereas you can with [replace]. I'm not sure if it is possible to support that, or how important it is. Would that be a blocker to deprecating?

There are also some bugs (https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3AA-patch), particularly around patching git dependencies (such as #5478 and #4509). Not being able to switch branches seems particularly not good.

I don't know enough the judge how important these issues are.

[alexcrichton]

I think that's something we do want to support in [patch], just haven't had a chance to add yet! I just posted a strawman syntax and I suspect it would be pretty uncontroversial to add support for it. It's a good point about git repos, though! I suspect that [replace] suffers from basically the same issues though.

I personally think there's enough bugs and usage issues with [replace] that it's not worthwhile to keep around. We should definitely be funneling all development of features/fixes into [patch] instead of [replace]

[workingjubilee]

There are error messages emitted that still point to [replace] that should probably point to using a [patch] table instead.

[akien-mga]

There are error messages emitted that still point to [replace] that should probably point to using a [patch] table instead.

Indeed, I saw that so I made a PR: #9533.

[elibroftw]

I was reading https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/overriding-dependencies.html#the-replace-section, and I'm completely dumbfounded with how to force the use of a specific version of a dependency that is also required by a sub dependency that is from git.

I'm trying to use https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri-plugin-window-state, however, it breaks my build since one of its sub-dependencies is broken.
The plugin depends on a version of tauri that is not the same as the one I depend on which depends on the broken wry.

The docs says replace is deprecated, but why is this issue still open then?
There are plenty of simple examples for patch, but they are not explained and they don't demonstrate flexibility.

[epage]

Replace was marked as deprecated in #7733, so I take it this is resolved? If there is something I'm missing, let us know so we can re-open this.