[mcguire]

"I once tried to write a simple IMAP cloning utility in Rust and found 4 IMAP crates -- none of them worked properly and all of them incorrectly handled several core parts of the IMAPv4 spec. I figured out later that they all appeared to be forks of one another (or they copied each others' APIs), but that doesn't help matters -- why are forked crates taking up more space in the global crate namespace? The "imap" crate doesn't implement IMAP properly!"

I noticed this problem with Perl and CPAN: there were dozens (well, several) email-sending packages, none of which were near complete. (Speaking SMTP is easy, an actual MTA is hard.)

I suspect there are similar issues in Java-land, although I haven't used Maven-derivatives enough to find out.

It's the wave of the future: make it really easy to share and use libraries, and get a crap-ton of low-quality libraries.