Is there a way to disable dynamic linking for release builds?

[rcorre]

Based on this SO answer, it is not possible to set profile-specific dependencies.

I'm wondering if I'm missing some other obvious way to disable the dynamic_linking feature for release builds. Do folks just edit their Cargo.toml every time they want to distribute a build?

Alternatively, is there an obvious way to distribute libbevy with your game? I see libbevy.so in the target/debug folder, but my game actually links to libbevy_dylib-db68960f13ec6f9b.so, which is buried somewhere in target/debug/deps.

[jf908]

You can enable bevy features using your own feature so I have a feature just called "dev" that has dynamic linking enabled:

[features]
dev = ["bevy/dynamic_linking"]

You have to remember to enable the feature during compilation though. My workflow is to always run cargo run --features dev during dev and cargo run --release (the feature is disabled by default) for release builds.

Not a perfect solution but doesn't rely on changing Cargo.toml.

[rcorre]

I found out you can pass cargo run --features bevy/dynamic_linking, so you don't need an intermediate feature, but this still requires you to remember a flag in the normal case, and omit the flag in the release case. I was hoping for a way to default to dynamic with cargo run, and omit the flag in release (e.g. cargo run --no-features bevy/dynamic_linking, which doesn't seem to exist).

[jf908]

Yep, unfortunately cargo just doesn't support that. The only alternatives I can offer is using a wrapper command like just or personally I have setup an alias in my config.toml called dev to make the command a bit shorter: cargo dev but of course this does mean using non standard commands that are specific to your project.

[rcorre]

Oh that's nice, I like the alias idea, thanks!