rust-dep-hygiene

name: rust-dep-hygiene description: Dependency hygiene for the Rocky engine workspace — how to add/update deps via [workspace.dependencies], MSRV 1.88 policy, cargo-audit / cargo-deny / cargo-machete usage, and how the weekly security audit surfaces advisories.

Dependency hygiene for the Rocky engine

Workspace-dep rule

All dependencies go through [workspace.dependencies] in engine/Cargo.toml. Individual crates under engine/crates/* inherit versions by referencing the workspace:

# In crates/rocky-fivetran/Cargo.toml
[dependencies]
reqwest  = { workspace = true }
tokio    = { workspace = true }
thiserror = { workspace = true }

Never do this in a leaf crate:

# DON'T — bypasses the workspace pin
[dependencies]
reqwest = "0.12"

Why: the workspace is 22 crates. Per-crate version pins drift, cause duplicate dep compilations, and break the MSRV contract.

Adding a new workspace dependency

1. Edit engine/Cargo.toml and add the dep to [workspace.dependencies] with the exact version and feature set you need.
2. In the specific crate that needs it, add <dep> = { workspace = true } (plus a features = [...] override if the crate needs a narrower subset — it's allowed to turn features on, never off).
3. Run cargo build -p <crate> to confirm resolution.
4. Run cargo tree -d to check you haven't introduced a duplicate version of anything (see "Duplicates" below).
5. Never cargo add inside a sub-crate without the --workspace or without editing [workspace.dependencies] first.

Upgrading a workspace dependency

# From engine/
cargo update -p <crate_name>            # Minor/patch only — respects the Cargo.toml version req.
cargo update                            # Everything — use with care, always review Cargo.lock diff.

Major version bumps require editing engine/Cargo.toml directly and checking the changelog for breaking changes. Pin the version in [workspace.dependencies], not in individual crates.

MSRV (1.88, Rust 2024 edition)

engine/Cargo.toml declares:

[workspace.package]
edition = "2024"
rust-version = "1.88"

Bumped 1.85.1 → 1.88 on 2026-05-24: the rocky-mcp crate's rmcp 1.7 tree (rmcp-macros → darling 0.23, plus time 0.3.47) requires rustc 1.88, so the effective workspace MSRV was already 1.88.

Rules:

1. Don't use features newer than 1.88 in any engine crate. If a stable feature lands in 1.89+, either wait for the next MSRV bump or gate your usage behind something that compiles on 1.88.
2. Dependencies can have their own MSRV. If a dep requires Rust 1.90 and Rocky is on 1.88, you have two choices: pin an older version of the dep (check cargo tree and the dep's changelog) or propose an MSRV bump.
3. Bumping MSRV is a policy change. Don't do it unilaterally. Propose to Hugo, note the reason (typically: a dep dropped support for the old MSRV), and bump both the [workspace.package] line and the CI toolchain installer in .github/workflows/engine-ci.yml in the same PR.
4. Edition bumps (2024 → 2027 when that exists) are separate from MSRV bumps and even rarer. Don't conflate them.

Security audit: cargo audit

Rocky runs cargo audit weekly, not on every PR. From .github/workflows/engine-weekly.yml:

schedule:
  - cron: '0 8 * * 1'   # Monday 08:00 UTC

- name: Run cargo audit
  run: cargo audit

The workflow is also manually dispatchable (workflow_dispatch) and marked continue-on-error: true, so advisories don't block PRs — they surface as a Monday morning report.

To run it locally:

cargo install cargo-audit     # first time only
cd engine
cargo audit

When to react:

• critical or high — fix this week. Either bump the transitive dep (via cargo update -p or a workspace bump) or vendor a patch.
• medium — schedule a fix in the current iteration.
• low / informational — note, don't drop everything.
• unsound advisories on a library dep are different from vulnerabilities — they indicate soundness bugs in the dep, and the right fix is usually a version bump or a report upstream, not a workspace allowlist.

cargo audit does not currently have an allow-list for accepted advisories in Rocky. If you want to ignore a specific advisory with a reason, that's a policy change — propose it to Hugo first. (The mechanism is audit.toml with ignore = ["RUSTSEC-YYYY-NNNN"] and a reason = "..." line.)

License / supply-chain checks: cargo-deny (not currently configured)

Rocky does not ship a deny.toml or run cargo-deny in CI as of this skill's authoring. The project's license is Apache-2.0 (engine/Cargo.toml → [workspace.package]). If you want to enforce license compatibility or a banned-deps policy, proposing cargo-deny adoption is the right move — but do it as a dedicated PR, not smuggled into an unrelated change. A minimal deny.toml for Rocky would cover:

• licenses: allow Apache-2.0, MIT, BSD-3-Clause, ISC, Unicode-DFS-2016; deny GPL-* / AGPL-* (Rocky is Apache-2.0 and can't take copyleft deps).
• bans: ban known-bad crates (e.g. openssl-sys when rustls is already the chosen TLS stack — Rocky uses reqwest = { features = ["rustls-tls"] }).
• advisories: fail on unmaintained + unsound (beyond what cargo audit already catches).
• sources: restrict to crates-io unless explicit git deps are reviewed.

Don't enable this without Hugo's sign-off — it's the kind of change that turns a clean workspace red on day one.

Unused deps: cargo-machete

cargo-machete finds unused dependencies per crate. Run it when you've done a large refactor and want to clean up:

cargo install cargo-machete   # first time only
cd engine
cargo machete

Caveats:

• cargo-machete looks at Cargo.toml vs. actual use statements. It sometimes false-positives on deps that are used only through macros (e.g. serde_json via json!) or only behind #[cfg(...)] feature gates.
• Always review the diff before deleting a dep — especially if the dep is declared at workspace level; removing it from a leaf crate's Cargo.toml is fine, but removing it from [workspace.dependencies] may break another crate.
• Run cargo build --all-targets after any deletion to confirm nothing broke.

Duplicates: cargo tree -d

cd engine
cargo tree -d             # show duplicate versions of any transitive dep
cargo tree -d -e features # include feature-flag differences

Duplicates bloat compile time and binary size. The common causes:

• A workspace dep and a git-pinned dep both pull the same transitive crate at different versions.
• A feature flag causes two copies of a dep with different feature sets.
• A sub-crate declared its own version of a dep that's already in [workspace.dependencies].

Fix by unifying on one version at the workspace level. Sometimes you can't — two upstreams depend on incompatible ranges of the same crate — in which case document it as a known duplicate and move on.

Dep policy cheatsheet

Related skills

• rust-clippy-triage — deprecated-API warnings from bumped deps often surface as clippy lints first.
• rust-error-handling — when upgrading thiserror or anyhow specifically, read the release notes for breaking changes in derive syntax.
• rocky-release (monorepo root) — release-time dep pinning and lockfile policy for the engine-v* tag.