Preliminary feature staging

This partially implements the feature staging described in the
[release channel RFC][rc]. It does not yet fully conform to the RFC as
written, but does accomplish its goals sufficiently for the 1.0 alpha
release.

It has three primary user-visible effects:

* On the nightly channel, use of unstable APIs generates a warning.
* On the beta channel, use of unstable APIs generates a warning.
* On the beta channel, use of feature gates generates a warning.

Code that does not trigger these warnings is considered 'stable',
modulo pre-1.0 bugs.

Disabling the warnings for unstable APIs continues to be done in the
existing (i.e. old) style, via `#[allow(...)]`, not that specified in
the RFC. I deem this marginally acceptable since any code that must do
this is not using the stable dialect of Rust.

Use of feature gates is itself gated with the new 'unstable_features'
lint, on nightly set to 'allow', and on beta 'warn'.

The attribute scheme used here corresponds to an older version of the
RFC, with the `#[staged_api]` crate attribute toggling the staging
behavior of the stability attributes, but the user impact is only
in-tree so I'm not concerned about having to make design changes later
(and I may ultimately prefer the scheme here after all, with the
`#[staged_api]` crate attribute).

Since the Rust codebase itself makes use of unstable features the
compiler and build system to a midly elaborate dance to allow it to
bootstrap while disobeying these lints (which would otherwise be
errors because Rust builds with `-D warnings`).

This patch includes one significant hack that causes a
regression. Because the `format_args!` macro emits calls to unstable
APIs it would trigger the lint.  I added a hack to the lint to make it
not trigger, but this in turn causes arguments to `println!` not to be
checked for feature gates. I don't presently understand macro
expansion well enough to fix. This is bug #20661.

Closes #16678

[rc]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/0507-release-channels.md

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/src/liballoc/lib.rs b/src/liballoc/lib.rs
index ba6e89cdd76..a5153f64aec 100644
--- a/src/liballoc/lib.rs
+++ b/src/liballoc/lib.rs
@@ -58,6 +58,7 @@
 
 #![crate_name = "alloc"]
 #![experimental]
+#![staged_api]
 #![crate_type = "rlib"]
 #![doc(html_logo_url = "http://www.rust-lang.org/logos/rust-logo-128x128-blk-v2.png",
        html_favicon_url = "http://www.rust-lang.org/favicon.ico",