Something to keep in mind is https://blog.m-ou.se/rust-is-not-a-company/. Rust is mostly driven by volunteers working on what they find interesting. Boring/uninteresting tasks depend on funding, a warm body to accept the funding, and a reviewer.
It's not just that this is boring work, but there's disagreement about Cargo and crates.io's direction. There are a lot of changes people would like to make that get turned down.
Crates.io and Cargo need namespaces, but the leadership flatly says no.
There's a big problem with name squatting, and nothing is being done about this either.
I get that there are more technically important issues around builds and reproducibility and the like, but this is pretty foundational stuff.
That and the existing reply are incorrect. Almost everyone has repeated the same superficial requests and design work and not dug into the problems to come up with a proposal that respectfully threads seemingly contradictory requirements (the answer isn't to be dismissive but to step through costs/benefits and explain why a path is justified).
> Crates.io and Cargo need namespaces, but the leadership flatly says no.
They are favorable to crate-name-as-namespace (so that once you have the tokio crate you can use tokio as a namespace) and there's ongoing work on that. But as said above, it takes work to implement.
There's no desire for other meaning of the word "namespace" because famously nobody ever made a well-reasoned proposal (despite the amount of social media outrage over the lack of namespace).
Crates is widely used so it's a rebuilding the track while the train is driving kind of problem.
It's just not a priority for the project right now, but I would also definitely like to see the issue done. It might be good for the rust project to vote on things like this during surveys so they know where to focus work!
From a supply-chain perspective, Cargo is still in the same broad risk category as npm and PyPI: installing packages means trusting externally published code, including code that may execute during build or installation.
Rather than looking for someone to blame - in this case, GitHub - we should focus on constructive ways to harden the ecosystem.
TL;DR: They want to fix this, it's a lot of work that no one's being paid to do, there's a roadmap with specific tasks that need doing, volunteer contributions are welcome.
> it's a lot of work that no one's being paid to do,
aren't they like some kind of non-profit (in the legal sense) that is still able to take a lot of money (from players like Google and Co, to justify fixing this), as opposed to ... say the Zig foundation, ... that is is also "non-profit" but can't get money the same way?
The non-profit (the Foundation) pays for specific things but it is not really there to hire people to work on things. It pays for infrastructure work and to pay the existing maintainers who often do review work. It also gives stipends to up-and-coming contributors for Open Source outreach programmes, but this are not really the people who you want to have immediately work on your critical infrastructure code.
10 years ago, GitHub had a far better reputation and the Rust ecosystem was much smaller and less load-bearing, so "what if someone doesn't have a GitHub account" was a theoretical concern for most people. So the issue was a low-priority backlog item that everyone agreed would be nice-to-have but there weren't enough people willing to volunteer their time to it over more important and more impactful work.
Obviously, the situation has changed in recent years, so it's now considered a much higher priority by many people and some of them are actively working on it. But it's a lot of work to be done by volunteers, so it takes time.
That's the reality of open-source projects: things get done when they are important enough to motivate someone to either fund it or work on in their free time, not according to idyllic roadmaps and schedules.
The reason people were sounding the alarm 10 years ago is because if you tie yourself to a proprietary platform then you're at its mercy, even if it changes for the worse for everyone which is what we're seeing now.
With open-source projects, realistically there is no shortage of alarm sounding, and there is a shortage of alarm fixing, consequently if you really care about this being fixed you have to volunteer to go fix it.
From the outset, crates.io was careful to deliberately not tie itself inextricably to Github. For example, by resisting the endless deluge of people demanding that Github usernames be used as public-facing package namespaces. Github is only used as an identity provider for logging in.
The longer I go the more I have actually come to appreciate the way Packagist works for the PHP community, there are lots of cool things it does that I wish NPM or other registries did by default, like forcing you to package from a source repository, so that you can't upload a different artifact from what you keep in source control.
I think crates.io is essentially just the default, and you can point cargo to an alternate package repository, if you so desire.
I've worked on projects where we vendored all third-party crates, for example, so our config just pointed to that vendoring, and I think support ought to be better these days…
Go handles this well, kind of. It's super easy (in fact, transparent) to import from GitHub urls. You can self-host your Go packages, but it involves making and hosting some manifest files. Not as seamless as using GitHub, but still totally doable.
The teams support may be a bit trickier/less clear to move on, but generally: this feels like a great place where atproto / bluesky support would slot in well.
The only thing GitHub is used as on crates.io is as an identity provider. Using your atproto identity is pretty straightforwardly a conceptual substitute.
Using crates.io is entirely optional, you can download a library's source code and specify the path to it in your cargo config file. (Which is not uncommon in production)
For that matter, using cargo is optional, you can compile rust code using GNU make or shell scripts if you want to. (That's what the Linux kernel does)
The implementation on this has started.
Something to keep in mind is https://blog.m-ou.se/rust-is-not-a-company/. Rust is mostly driven by volunteers working on what they find interesting. Boring/uninteresting tasks depend on funding, a warm body to accept the funding, and a reviewer.
Crates.io and Cargo need namespaces, but the leadership flatly says no.
There's a big problem with name squatting, and nothing is being done about this either.
I get that there are more technically important issues around builds and reproducibility and the like, but this is pretty foundational stuff.
https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/survey-of-organizational-o... is a start in just collecting existing knowledge in one place.
They are favorable to crate-name-as-namespace (so that once you have the tokio crate you can use tokio as a namespace) and there's ongoing work on that. But as said above, it takes work to implement.
There's no desire for other meaning of the word "namespace" because famously nobody ever made a well-reasoned proposal (despite the amount of social media outrage over the lack of namespace).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGS-HqcAvA4 Here's a long video from jon gjengset that shows how it works and some of the effort already done to de-couple from github.
Crates is widely used so it's a rebuilding the track while the train is driving kind of problem.
It's just not a priority for the project right now, but I would also definitely like to see the issue done. It might be good for the rust project to vote on things like this during surveys so they know where to focus work!
Rather than looking for someone to blame - in this case, GitHub - we should focus on constructive ways to harden the ecosystem.
TL;DR: They want to fix this, it's a lot of work that no one's being paid to do, there's a roadmap with specific tasks that need doing, volunteer contributions are welcome.
aren't they like some kind of non-profit (in the legal sense) that is still able to take a lot of money (from players like Google and Co, to justify fixing this), as opposed to ... say the Zig foundation, ... that is is also "non-profit" but can't get money the same way?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
Obviously, the situation has changed in recent years, so it's now considered a much higher priority by many people and some of them are actively working on it. But it's a lot of work to be done by volunteers, so it takes time.
That's the reality of open-source projects: things get done when they are important enough to motivate someone to either fund it or work on in their free time, not according to idyllic roadmaps and schedules.
10 (edit: 8) years ago MS took over Github. The writing was on the wall then...
No need to explain OSS to me, I maintain and contribute.
You can:
- host a private index
- host the proprietary binaries in a git repo and use a git dependency
- commit the proprietary binaries into your source repo, and use a path dependency
I've worked on projects where we vendored all third-party crates, for example, so our config just pointed to that vendoring, and I think support ought to be better these days…
It's really not clear to me why people keep avoiding that.
For that matter, using cargo is optional, you can compile rust code using GNU make or shell scripts if you want to. (That's what the Linux kernel does)