Does crates.io have a backup plan?
Does crates.io have a backup plan?
It's possible that the .io cctld is going to go away [0]. Does crates.io have a backup plan at all? Does anyone know what problems it would end up causing?
I imagine the package registry having to move domains is going to cause a ton of problems.
Frankly, it's concerning to me that so much of the Rust ecosystem has chosen to standardize on shaky ccTLDs. The Indian Ocean Territory (.io) is a small island territory whose only inhabitants are a single military base, it is crazy to use that domain for something important. Serbia (.rs) is more stable, but they could still cut off access for non-Serbians if they wanted to.
What about stopping the bullsh*t of TLD nonsense and doing something like
crates.rust-lang.org? It's the most sensible solution.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.
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?
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.
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.
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's more bizarre that a single organisation would have such tight control over the Internet. Assigning a tld to each country is a good way to appease each country and give them autonomy over their own portion
Why top-level, though? Why not amazon.in.com?
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.