[kibwen]

  > if that goes away so does the Cargo index

Not so, the location of the index is independent of crates.io. Currently the index itself is just hosted on Github, whereas all of crates.io is hosted on S3. Which is actually kind of a pain sometimes, since if Github goes down it means that Cargo won't be able to find the index and I don't know if there's an easy way to override the index check. In the future I expect Cargo will gracefully continue if the index can't be updated due to connection failure, though I'd think it would prompt the user to make sure they're aware that their local copy of the index might be out of date.

[eridius]

Ah, good to know. I assumed the index was hosted as part of crates.io but I didn't actually bother to check. The point I was trying to make (even if I didn't communicate it properly) was that if crates.io goes away for good, the index will too and so it won't really matter that the code is inaccessible because cargo won't know where to find it anyway. Of course, based on what you said, it's certainly possible for everyone involved in crates.io to get hit by a bus and crates.io vanish when the S3 bill goes unpaid while still leaving the index up on GitHub, but if crates.io is taken down intentionally then presumably so will the index.