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tl;dr Gentoo requires users to build packages locally meaning they are dependent on the build software for a library to have Gentoo support for their architecture. Rust has limited support for some of the architectures Gentoo otherwise supports. Since this is an important crypto library adopting Rust Gentoo may have to drop support for certain currently supported architectures.

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Seems like Gentoo found an alternative package,

"Back in Gentoo-land, it turned out that the cryptography dependency for Portage came because it was using urllib3 and requests. Those two packages in Gentoo are dependent on cryptography, but it turns out that they do not actually need it. A pull request to fix that was merged, so the problem for Portage, which is pretty fundamental to the operation of a Gentoo system, was averted."

Do you have a link for this?

It is in the article.

The issue is kinda more complex: cryptography is also a hard dependency of pip, the official Python package installer. And CPython itself seem to support PPC64 and s390x — which are Tier 2 targets for rust.

Hence, pip now depends on software that is not tested on some platforms officially supported by Python…

Sources: - https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/rustc/platform-support.htm... - https://buildbot.python.org/all/#/grid

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