I'd very much welcome a crates.io alternative that doesn't require github and supports namespacing by username or org. The dependency on a proprietary platform rubs me the wrong way.
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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Namespacing by username or org is a good way to get people to download the compromised wrong crate though since barely any document will talk about that part of the name and it will sometimes change over the lifetime of a project.
Is that a problem with java? In fact, is it even a problem on github where repos are namespaced by user or org?
What about stopping the bullsh*t of TLD nonsense and doing something like crates.rust-lang.org? It's the most sensible solution.
Forgot to mention .sh, which is also a ccTLD for a tiny island nation, and also shouldn't be used for hosting anything that is difficult to move.
Saint Helena is in no way comparable because it's not disputed territory. Back when Mauritius became independent the British carved out some islands for their continued colonial use, breaking (back then brand new) international law.
Saint Helena has no such connection to another country and it was uninhabited before the Dutch settled. The Brits later conquered it but even if the Dutch want it back it'd keep its autonomous territory status and therefore its own TLD, the Dutch have plenty of those.
They can still revoke its use anytime they want. Which is the main issue right?
So can any TLD holder. The rules for .org might change to disallow individuals. .com might outlaw non-profits. .net might get restricted to ISPs. There is a small, but existent, chance that all the oxygen molecules in the room I'm in are going to decide that they'll huddle up in some corner, leaving me to suffocate. I refuse to worry about it.
If you want to be paranoid like that you can send the rust foundation some money and tell them to spend it on the .rust and .ferris gTLDs.
@barsoap @GetOffMyLan It's not even all that hypothetical tbh. I don't recall the details exactly but there was a big scare a few years ago when .org changed hands.
I seriously doubt they will actually phase it out, with such a popular TLD. They made an exception for .su, I don't see why they wouldn't this time as well.
I doubt they will too, but it's still dumb that an entire package ecosystem now has to hope that ICANN will make another exception and special case .io
ICANN tried to phase out .su, the only reason they didn't was because Russia was big enough to tell them no.
If the domain .io ever gets unusable, then all it needs for Rust / creates.io is to change the respository setting in the configuration of your project to point to new location. Maybe this could be done automatically through an update of Rust tools. It will probably cause headache for automated build systems and for newcomers, but overall its not as bad of an issue as it looks like, I think.
But I agree on that it wasn't a good idea to use .io and .rs as their backbone. It should have been .com or .org in example, where you know wouldn't go away ever. Not a fan of country level domains for important projects.
Serbia isn't going to vanish any time soon.
But it could limit the usage of its TLD.
Unlikely, and even more unlikely to not be able to be worked around by a local rust user group.
Like, the .eu restriction to only give out domains to individuals and companies within the EEA is more about having a domestic contact than anything else, EURid doesn't care who actually uses the domain just that it has European legal representation.
Obviously this isn't specific to Rust, but frankly it's bizarre to me that ICANN chose to tie top-level domains to country codes in the first place. Languages might have made sense, but a major feature of the internet is that it's less beholden to political boundaries than most of the physical world is.
It makes a lot of sense for businesses, especially where different countries might have different regulations. E.g., amazon.ca and amazon.in. Both sites are in English but it makes way more sense to split them up by country.
Why top-level, though? Why not amazon.in.com?
Interestingly enough, you also have amazon.co.uk, which combines the nature (commercial) and location served (UK), but in the opposite order.
There's zero chance they will get rid of .io.
Are you willing to bet the stability of an entire language's dependency ecosystem on that? Just so that we can write "crates.io" instead of "crates.rust-lang.org"?
That's really the question. I do agree that there's almost no chance it goes away as too many places and too much money depends on it.
Yes I definitely am. It's really nice that crates.io is short, and it's silly to give that up for a miniscule risk of something moderately annoying happening.
Even if the domain goes away we'd just have to all move to a new domain. Annoying but hardly the end of the world. Cargo.io isn't actually hard-coded in many places. It's nothing like if github.com stopped existing.
Submit an issue asking for preemptive GNS (Gnu Name System) domain name support, and leave a link to it here.
It shouldn't be too hard to have a backup domain point to the same resources. Could even be setup as a fallback mirror by default.