While it's nice that they want to converge on rustup, I greatly prefer using my distro-provided compiler in almost all cases. Right now that is rustc 1.14, which means that that alacritty is currently beyond my compilation capability.
I don't think this is nearly as bad as the grandparent suggested though. The language is young, I'd prefer experimental features remain in the experimental branch rather than get bad design stuck in the language.
I think if you're doing dev, it's completely reasonable to expect the dev to install a newer toolchain. Cargo makes all of the actually painful parts of contributing to a project pretty trivial.
Don't worry. The Rust community is sensitive to the desire to only install Rust with a package manager. There was even talk (a few days ago) of making an LTS version of the Rust compiler for use in more conservative distros that don't want to update it every 6 weeks.
On another front, Rust is working hard to get people off of nightly. This project, for example, uses 3 unstable features. Clippy can already work on stable (edit: code that is linted with Clippy can also build on stable in some setups), Custom Derive will be stable in less than a month, and inclusive ranges is a pretty minor feature.
I would expect this project to begin working on stable for Rust 1.15, but I'm not affiliated with it directly, that's just my guess.
Sorry Manish, I had meant that you can have code that can be built using a stable compiler while still using Clippy via another means. I typically use stable, but I run clippy on my code anyway. I realize that my post is confusing, I'll edit.
I don't think this is nearly as bad as the grandparent suggested though. The language is young, I'd prefer experimental features remain in the experimental branch rather than get bad design stuck in the language.
I think if you're doing dev, it's completely reasonable to expect the dev to install a newer toolchain. Cargo makes all of the actually painful parts of contributing to a project pretty trivial.