That makes sense. It's probably not worth doing this then since the only benefit would be a slight simplification of our build scripts and I cannot come up with any other reason why I would want to do this.

@kevswims I'm in a similar situation that you described on your post.
What was your solution? Did you fork tonic_build and disable rustfmt?

@bernardoaraujor In our build.rs we do a check to see if rustfmt is available like this:

    let fmt_available = Command::new("rustfmt").arg("--version").output().is_ok();

Then when we call tonic_build::configure we pass that in to turn formatting on or off like this:

    tonic_build::configure().format(fmt_available).compile(
        ...
    )?;

hmm thanks @kevswims !

I'm just patching Cargo.toml to disable codegen-rustfmt as a feature.

 [features]
-default = ["codegen-rustfmt"]
 with-bench = []
-codegen-rustfmt = ["chain-network/codegen-rustfmt"]
 integration-test = []
 soak-test = []
 systemd = ["tracing-journald"]

Perhaps your approach is more elegant, but in my case there's a few degrees of dependency between the package I'm actually bitbaking (jormungandr), and crate that uses tonic_build (chain-libs/chain-network).

So patching jormungandr's Cargo.toml felt a like a shorter path. Also I don't need any forks.

Ahh, that is more difficult since it is not within your build.rs. We are the one's using protobuf directly in our code so it was easy to put this into the build.rs.

I wonder if this would be better solved by an environment variable that would disable formatting? That would be easy to set in the yocto recipe at least.