The dependencies of the bigint feature on rand and rustc_serialize should be optional.

[briansmith]

My builds are failing on Nightly because I depend on num and the rand crate fails to build on Nightly. My crate only depends on rand because it depends on BigInt. I tried to build without the rand dependency but that made BigInt unavailable.

Instead all of BigInt being dependent on the rand feature, only the random-related parts of Bigint should depend on the rand feature. And, in particular, when building num without the rand feature, the rest of BigInt should work.

[briansmith]

See rust-lang/rust#30713.

[briansmith]

Oops, here's the real issue: If you build with the bigint feature (which is the default), then there's a non-optional dependency on rand and rustc_serialize. There should be some way to make that dependency optional and for users of num to build without those dependencies.

[cuviper]

Sure, making these fully optional would be welcome.

It used to be mandatory for bigint to have rust-serialize for ToHex, but I nixed that. The remaining derives could be configured like they are in complex and rational.

So these two would be dropped from bigint dependencies, then added to default feature list instead.

[briansmith]

Just to be clear, you would accept this?:

• Add two new features: serialize and rand.
• Add those two features to the default feature set.
• Make the FromHex/ToHex parts of bigint conditional on the serialize feature.
• Make the rand-dependent parts of bigint conditional on the rand feature.
• Remove the dependencies on rustc_serialize and rand from the bigint feature.

[briansmith]

My pull request #154 fixes this.

Add two new features: serialize and rand.

Optional dependencies are handled like features, so I didn't need to do this.

Add those two features to the default feature set.

I did this.

Make the FromHex/ToHex parts of bigint conditional on the serialize feature.

I made it conditional on the "rustc_serialize" feature.

Make the rand-dependent parts of bigint conditional on the rand feature.

I did this, but I also had to enable the rand functionality for all test builds because some of the tests are randomized using the rand functionality.

Remove the dependencies on rustc_serialize and rand from the bigint feature.

I did this.

[cuviper]

#154 is merged.

[briansmith]

Thanks for the quick turnaround. Is there going to be a release to crates.io soon that will include this change? Thanks!

[cuviper]

I suppose we should. I don't like publishing a release with dirty CI, but this change in particular will help others get around the rand issues.

[cuviper]

num 0.1.30 is now published.