Disabling recursive Cargo.toml search on `cargo install --git ...`

[fantoine]

I have a bin project which I want to install from a git repository with cargo install --git ....

I have some files named Cargo.toml on my tests. These files are not meant to be used by Cargo but only for my tests, and some of them are intentionally malformed.

Installing from git doesn't work correctly because of this. It looks like Cargo seek to find and interpret all Cargo.toml files on the repository, and then, obviously, it breaks the compilation because of these malformed files.

Strangely, it works correctly if I use cargo install --path ... on a local cloned repository.
By the way, if I change the call to PathSource::new_recursive(..) by PathSource::new(..) on cargo/sources/git/source.rs file, it works correctly for my case.

I looked on Cargo source code, but didn't find why this recursive search is required?
Is there a way to disable it, or at least on tests folder?

[alexcrichton]

Ah yeah this is an unfortunate aspect of Cargo where when you specify a git dependency you only specify a repository, not a path within that repository. This means that to find nested dependencies Cargo must auto-probe the repository for all Cargo.toml files.

I think though that Cargo should probably just ignore malformed Cargo.toml, especially in git dependencies. That I believe would work for your use case as well, right?

[fantoine]

I understand better why it works like this.

I guess that ignoring malformed Cargo.toml files could work in my case.

However, intuitively I expected git source to behave just like path source.
Maybe, an other solution could be to have an optional flag in parallel of --git to enable/disable this recursive behavior?

[fantoine]

Or even simpler, it may ignore all Cargo folders just like target is ignored:

• benches
• examples
• src
• tests

[alexcrichton]

Nah I think we should basically just ignore bad manifests for now. Anything else runs the risk of being a breaking change, unfortunately.

[fantoine]

I think it's ok for me like this. :)

Should I submit a PR?
I'm not sure where to ignore invalid Cargo.toml files.

[alexcrichton]

Oh yes of course PRs would be most welcome!

The errors stem from around this location (notably the recursive flag), although I'm not 100% sure where the fix would go.

[carols10cents]

Looks like this was fixed by #3998. Closing, thank you!!