[dasmoth]

I realise this is being done with the best of intentions and will probably be a big net positive in practise, but something about the way it has been presented here rubs me up the wrong way.

In short, the blog post makes very little mention of the role of the primary author(s) of the libraries in question, beyond "Every two weeks, hold a library team meeting [...] with the author in attendance." While I imagine the reality will be quite different, this sounds an awful lot like "oi, you, code review in my office now!"

One of the attractions of working on open source is that it offers more scope for autonomy and individual recognition than the typical commercial software job. It's slightly alarming that this doesn't seem to be recognised here.

As I say, I'm sure the reality will be fine (and I remain very keen to give Rust a serious try when time permits), but the rather collectivist presentation here is a tiny bit off-putting.

[steveklabnik]

Most of the crates being focused on are either maintained by the libs team already, or are authored by a member of the libs team. It turns out that the people on the libs team have written a lot of widely used and pretty solid libraries ;)

Nobody is forcing stuff on random crate authors; if they didn't want to participate, then that's 100% okay.

[dasmoth]

Thanks, that puts a slightly different perspective on things!

I still feel there's a slightly-unfortunate ambiguity in the linked announcement post, though.

[steveklabnik]

Totally, I hear you. It can be tough from both sides, that is, to people super heavily involved in Rust, they know these names, so the fact is obvious. So it doesn't get written down, and then when people from _outside_ of living and breathing Rust every day read it, they don't have the context.

Words are hard.

[twic]

I suspected this was probably the case. I urge you to make it very, very clear.

As a prospective crate author - and every programmer is a prospective crate author - i interpreted this as saying that if i publish a crate which people find useful, i might be getting an unexpected visit from the Rust Police.

[cies]

I would be thrilled to have my code reviewed! Quite often I see requests for "please critique my code" in subreddits of several programming languages.

Must say that I agree with you that the authors do not seem to take a very central role in the process as described. But I see that more as an easy fix in the announcement text.

[JasonSage]

I had the exact same reaction—it is very off-putting.

It's not just this, either, a lot of the top-down communication in the Rust ecosystem has a feel like this. I'm not sure what to make of it, except that I think their attitude is probably too authoritative.