Remove paste dependency.

[liurenjie1024]

Is your feature request related to a problem or challenge?

As describen in #1053 , paste crate is no longer maintained.

Describe the solution you'd like

We need to refactor our code to remove depencendy of paste crate.

Willingness to contribute

• I can contribute to this feature independently
• I would be willing to contribute to this feature with guidance from the Iceberg Rust community
• I cannot contribute to this feature at this time

[TennyZhuang]

Does the crate really need maintain? It's really easy, outputs deterministic results, and has no runtime dependencies.

[Xuanwo]

Does the crate really need maintain? It's really easy, outputs deterministic results, and has no runtime dependencies.

Hi, I fully agree with your statements here.

However, the ASF has been seen as open-source software stewards (according to the CRA), so it is our own responsibility to ensure our dependencies are up to date and well-maintained. Otherwise, at some point (though no one has yet), someone may raise a CVE against us, forcing us to take urgent action.

We can still defend our position as we've discussed here, but most end users—who may not even know what Rust is—only find us because our project appears in their SBOM. They will simply see that paste is unmaintained and treat it as a security issue.

Ultimately, we need to take action. We should either remove paste entirely or migrate to another library.

[sundy-li]

There are three approaches

1. Use rust nightly features concat_idents! instead
2. Use other similar crates like https://github.com/wdanilo/eval-macro
3. Expand the macro to be redundant codes

Which one do we prefer ?

[Xuanwo]

1. iceberg-rust needs to work under stable rust, so we can't.
2. eval-macro is relatively new. Do we have any other options?
3. It looks like we only use paste!() here:

https://github.com/apache/iceberg-rust/blob/cf780f437964494acd15d119ccdc2c63cc6633d8/crates/iceberg/src/arrow/schema.rs#L690C3-L692

will this be heavy work?

[liurenjie1024]

1. iceberg-rust needs to work under stable rust, so we can't.
2. eval-macro is relatively new. Do we have any other options?
3. It looks like we only use paste!() here:

https://github.com/apache/iceberg-rust/blob/cf780f437964494acd15d119ccdc2c63cc6633d8/crates/iceberg/src/arrow/schema.rs#L690C3-L692

will this be heavy work?

Both 2 and 3 LGTM. The usage of paste! is to remove duplication, and it seems not much duplication as only min/max is used.

[TennyZhuang]

4. Fork the crate and maintain it. (In fact, it’s likely that no work need to be done.)

[Xuanwo]

The usage of paste! is to remove duplication, and it seems not much duplication as only min/max is used.

It would be great if we expand them directly.