This partially implements the feature staging described in the
[release channel RFC][rc]. It does not yet fully conform to the RFC as
written, but does accomplish its goals sufficiently for the 1.0 alpha
release.
It has three primary user-visible effects:
* On the nightly channel, use of unstable APIs generates a warning.
* On the beta channel, use of unstable APIs generates a warning.
* On the beta channel, use of feature gates generates a warning.
Code that does not trigger these warnings is considered 'stable',
modulo pre-1.0 bugs.
Disabling the warnings for unstable APIs continues to be done in the
existing (i.e. old) style, via `#[allow(...)]`, not that specified in
the RFC. I deem this marginally acceptable since any code that must do
this is not using the stable dialect of Rust.
Use of feature gates is itself gated with the new 'unstable_features'
lint, on nightly set to 'allow', and on beta 'warn'.
The attribute scheme used here corresponds to an older version of the
RFC, with the `#[staged_api]` crate attribute toggling the staging
behavior of the stability attributes, but the user impact is only
in-tree so I'm not concerned about having to make design changes later
(and I may ultimately prefer the scheme here after all, with the
`#[staged_api]` crate attribute).
Since the Rust codebase itself makes use of unstable features the
compiler and build system do a midly elaborate dance to allow it to
bootstrap while disobeying these lints (which would otherwise be
errors because Rust builds with `-D warnings`).
This patch includes one significant hack that causes a
regression. Because the `format_args!` macro emits calls to unstable
APIs it would trigger the lint. I added a hack to the lint to make it
not trigger, but this in turn causes arguments to `println!` not to be
checked for feature gates. I don't presently understand macro
expansion well enough to fix. This is bug #20661.
Closes#16678
[rc]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/0507-release-channels.md
Next steps are to disable the existing out-of-tree behavior for stability attributes, and convert the remaining system to be feature-based per the RFC. During the first beta cycle we will set these lints to 'forbid'.
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