Hi @rijkvp thanks for the contribution!

One thing worth mentioning is that I've noticed that filesets only work with actual local file paths (e.g. ./some/path) but aren't as "general" as source filters (which can operate on other fixed point derivations). Take a look at #726 which adds an explicit regression test for this.

If we were to keep cleanCargoSource backwards compatible (i.e. a wrapper around lib.cleanSourceWith) but introduce a new cleanCargoFileset with your proposed implementation I'd be happy to consider merging it in!

Good catch @ipetkov! I didn't notice this would break that.
I agree that adding a new function using file sets is a better idea, and I am happy to work on it.

I'm imagining something like this:

craneLib.buildPackage {
    src = craneLib.makeCargoFileset [
        ./assets
        ./LICENSE
        (lib.fileset.fileFilter (file: file.hasExt "md") ./docs)
        # ... any additional file sets
    ] ./.;
    # ...
}

Which wraps something like filterCargoFileset which is kind of similar to filterCargoSources, which could be used to further customize the sources:

craneLib.buildPackage {
    src = lib.fileset.toSource {
        root = ./.;
        fileset = lib.fileset.unions [
            craneLib.filterCargoFileset # includes Cargo.toml, Cargo.lock, *.rs, etc.
            # additional file sets are included here
        ];
    };
    # ...
}

I'd love to hear your opinion on this. Also I'm not sure about the naming.

@rijkvp two thoughts come to mind:

1. regarding naming: maybe we can scope it under fileset to "match" nixpkgs? e.g. craneLib.fileset.cargoFileset seems sensible to me
2. regarding src = craneLib.makeCargoFileset ...: I know that filesets have to explicitly be converted to a source via lib.fileset.toSource, so perhaps we should not have craneLib.fileset.cargoFileset also call lib.fileset.toSource. That way if someone wants to keep tweaking the final fileset they can keep working with fileset objects (we can always introduce another helper in the future if we find it too noisy)