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.
echelon 11 hours ago [-]
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.
stymaar 10 hours ago [-]
> 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).
kelnos 1 hours ago [-]
There's just so much prior art here, though. Docker hub has username-based and org-based namespaces (as well as a "blessed package" root with no namespace). Maven central uses reverse-DNS as a namespace (and Maven central/OSSRH requires that you prove you own the domain before you can publish to it). Even npm, probably the poster child for doing things wrong, has user- and org-based namespaces.
This isn't a particularly difficult problem, and other package ecosystems have solved it many times in the past.
epage 8 hours ago [-]
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).
And you forgot to mention the bureaucratic process that also blocks warm bodies from developing code because the changes are not/unlikely to be accepted regardless of the level of excitement
satvikpendem 1 hours ago [-]
The Rust Foundation has explicitly no bearing on what the Rust Project does. They are not as related as one would think given the names.
vsgherzi 10 hours ago [-]
I agree and so does the rust project. The main problem is that it's alot of work and it's hard.
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.
DyslexicAtheist 11 hours ago [-]
> 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?
jojomodding 11 hours ago [-]
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.
sscaryterry 12 hours ago [-]
Just going to say it out loud :) Its been known for 10 years.
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.
dijit 11 hours ago [-]
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.
arjie 9 hours ago [-]
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.
estebank 8 hours ago [-]
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.
janalsncm 10 hours ago [-]
The comment you are replying to was in response to essentially the same point, albeit with fewer words and less emphasis.
kibwen 10 hours ago [-]
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.
Chu4eeno 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
A really popular saying on HN that's completely nonsensical under even a small amount of scrutiny.
mikey_p 11 hours ago [-]
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.
kelnos 59 minutes ago [-]
I'm not sure that really gives you the guarantees you think it does, though.
For example, I could push some malicious code, tag it, wait for Packagist to finish pulling it to publish a package, and then amend history to remove the malicious code, rewrite the git-tag, and force-push both to the git server.
This scheme makes it hard/impossible to push mismatching code by accident, but doesn't do much to stop a malicious actor.
ecshafer 10 hours ago [-]
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.
hmry 9 hours ago [-]
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
steveklabnik 9 hours ago [-]
crates.io also only distributes source code.
r2vcap 8 hours ago [-]
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.
kelnos 57 minutes ago [-]
That's a separate issue of supply-chain risk, and crates.io using GitHub auth isn't really material to that.
The gripe with using GitHub auth for crates.io is that GitHub is owned by a large, fickle corporation with a (shall we say) complicated history with open source, and people object on principled grounds to being forced to use GitHub in order to participate in the crates.io 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.
Animats 12 hours ago [-]
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.
sscaryterry 12 hours ago [-]
Especially not now, what if they're down? ;)
veqq 10 hours ago [-]
This is a big issue. https://janetdocs.org/ handles auth through GH which leads to... regular problems, unfortunately. I hope to migrate soon.
lorecore 9 hours ago [-]
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.
fyrn_ 8 hours ago [-]
In practice, Go is much, much more github dependent than rust, most go packages are on github
queenkjuul 4 hours ago [-]
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
jauntywundrkind 11 hours ago [-]
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.
dnfmfnfnfb 10 hours ago [-]
I don’t see how that would be effectively useful for any aspect of the problems
steveklabnik 10 hours ago [-]
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.
androiddrew 10 hours ago [-]
Welcome to Golang packaging problems. Hope you get it sorted out
sshine 10 hours ago [-]
But Sylvain Kerkour says Go's approach is much better than Rust's!
steveklabnik 9 hours ago [-]
The shape is very different. The only thing crates.io uses GitHub for is for identity.
bsder 9 hours ago [-]
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.
estebank 8 hours ago [-]
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.
what 6 hours ago [-]
$10/year is too high a price when I spend that much on my morning Starbucks order…
bsder 6 hours ago [-]
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.
dboreham 9 hours ago [-]
My take: publishing Rust crates shouldn't depend on any single internet property, including crates.io.
deathanatos 8 hours ago [-]
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…
pyreko 8 hours ago [-]
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.
rho138 9 hours ago [-]
Holy fuck it’s been a decade. Nothing is that complex.
adamch 8 hours ago [-]
PRs are welcome.
righthand 12 hours ago [-]
Aka one of the many Rust reasons why I chose to learn C.
kelnos 54 minutes ago [-]
I chose to learn C 25 years ago and avoid it now whenever I can. Life's too short to deal with memory unsafety.
hmry 11 hours ago [-]
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)
righthand 7 hours ago [-]
Still many more reasons to learn C!
antonvs 10 hours ago [-]
Welcome to 1972, young padawan. You have a long journey ahead of you.
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.
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).
This isn't a particularly difficult problem, and other package ecosystems have solved it many times in the past.
https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/survey-of-organizational-o... is a start in just collecting existing knowledge in one place.
And you forgot to mention the bureaucratic process that also blocks warm bodies from developing code because the changes are not/unlikely to be accepted regardless of the level of excitement
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!
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.
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.
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.
The reason LLMs seem to like them is because humans liked them first.
For example, I could push some malicious code, tag it, wait for Packagist to finish pulling it to publish a package, and then amend history to remove the malicious code, rewrite the git-tag, and force-push both to the git server.
This scheme makes it hard/impossible to push mismatching code by accident, but doesn't do much to stop a malicious actor.
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
Rather than looking for someone to blame - in this case, GitHub - we should focus on constructive ways to harden the ecosystem.
The gripe with using GitHub auth for crates.io is that GitHub is owned by a large, fickle corporation with a (shall we say) complicated history with open source, and people object on principled grounds to being forced to use GitHub in order to participate in the crates.io ecosystem.
Also supports npm, PyPI, and Ansible Galaxy.
It's really not clear to me why people keep avoiding that.
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.
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…
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)