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.
> 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).
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 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!
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.
> 10 years ago, GitHub had a far better reputation
While this might have been true in rust-circles (which I'm an outsider to), I think this varied a lot in different circles. Most free software projects invested a lot of money, time and effort in setting up better (for themselves) alternatives to Github.
Everything from videolan and GNU Savannah to XDG, Gnome, KDE, etc.
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.
Open source projects tend to be (and Rust certainly is) a showupocracy. Shit gets done when people that care about that shit does it. This means that important stuff that everyone agrees is important but not important enough for me to do, doesn't get done. And that some things end up being 80% solutions that scratch the itch of the person driving a project and progress stalls beyond that.
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.
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.
Cargo tied itself to GitHub back when GitHub still looked like an open-source utopia. Now the dependency is deeply baked in, and rolling it back would be very hard.
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.
Aren't all the ones in the actual Go registry mirrored, though? I thought I read that. They also make it trivial to vendor dependencies, idk if Crates handles that
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.
In my personal opinion, if a rogue actor can compromise your project by buying you the equivalent of a beer and a pizza, I don't think anyone should trust you as a dependency to any extent.
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…
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)
An RFC was recently merged to unblock this: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3963
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.
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.
> 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).
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).
https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/survey-of-organizational-o... is a start in just collecting existing knowledge in one place.
I agree and so does the rust project. The main problem is that it's alot of work and it's hard.
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!
See the official project issue on this: https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/326
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.
Just going to say it out loud :) Its been known for 10 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
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.
> 10 years ago, GitHub had a far better reputation
While this might have been true in rust-circles (which I'm an outsider to), I think this varied a lot in different circles. Most free software projects invested a lot of money, time and effort in setting up better (for themselves) alternatives to Github.
Everything from videolan and GNU Savannah to XDG, Gnome, KDE, etc.
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.
Open source projects tend to be (and Rust certainly is) a showupocracy. Shit gets done when people that care about that shit does it. This means that important stuff that everyone agrees is important but not important enough for me to do, doesn't get done. And that some things end up being 80% solutions that scratch the itch of the person driving a project and progress stalls beyond that.
The comment you are replying to was in response to essentially the same point, albeit with fewer words and less emphasis.
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.
Wow, have you forgotten? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
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.
crates.io was started long before the GitHub acquisition.
Yes, and your point?
Pro tip: Using "load-bearing" is heavily associated with LLM usage :)
You could say it’s the real smoking gun. With significant blast radius.
Pangram says human: https://www.pangram.com/history/208879e5-8510-479a-b96c-a20f...
This is where I would insert the Little Britain "Computer says no" meme.
It is also heavily associated with humans writing about things which bear load (in an xkcd #2347 sense) :)
Counterargument: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
A really popular saying on HN that's completely nonsensical under even a small amount of scrutiny.
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.
How does a close source package work? Depending on the language its not super helpful, but a package that is closed source should be possible.
For crates.io: They don't allow closed-source packages. But they're just the free community package index, you're not forced to use them.
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
crates.io also only distributes source code.
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.
I'm working on a tool for collaboratively reviewing Rust crate dependencies: https://github.com/thirdpass-org/thirdpass
Also supports npm, PyPI, and Ansible Galaxy.
Cargo tied itself to GitHub back when GitHub still looked like an open-source utopia. Now the dependency is deeply baked in, and rolling it back would be very hard.
Sadly, that's probably correct. No outside single point of failure that can cancel users at will can be allowed to gatekeep open source projects.
Especially not now, what if they're down? ;)
This is a big issue. https://janetdocs.org/ handles auth through GH which leads to... regular problems, unfortunately. I hope to migrate soon.
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.
In practice, Go is much, much more github dependent than rust, most go packages are on github
Aren't all the ones in the actual Go registry mirrored, though? I thought I read that. They also make it trivial to vendor dependencies, idk if Crates handles that
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.
I don’t see how that would be effectively useful for any aspect of the problems
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.
Welcome to Golang packaging problems. Hope you get it sorted out
But Sylvain Kerkour says Go's approach is much better than Rust's!
The shape is very different. The only thing crates.io uses GitHub for is for identity.
Can someone explain to me why the inverse domain name solution that everyone in the Java world converged on doesn't work?
It's really not clear to me why people keep avoiding that.
1) Trawl registry for packages owned by domains.
2) Note expired domains and register them yourself.
3) Supply chain compromise.
That, and not wanting people to fork out money for a domain as a requirement to participate in the ecosystem.
$10/year is too high a price when I spend that much on my morning Starbucks order…
In my personal opinion, if a rogue actor can compromise your project by buying you the equivalent of a beer and a pizza, I don't think anyone should trust you as a dependency to any extent.
My take: publishing Rust crates shouldn't depend on any single internet property, including crates.io.
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…
I mean... it technically doesn't? You can always point to other registries (or you can even just pull in git repos), we literally do this at work.
Holy fuck it’s been a decade. Nothing is that complex.
PRs are welcome.
Aka one of the many Rust reasons why I chose to learn C.
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)
Still many more reasons to learn C!
Welcome to 1972, young padawan. You have a long journey ahead of you.
Peak programming.
There’s been advancement since then old timer.