[dthul]

If we really wanted, Cargo could start supporting namespaces and everything currently on crates.io could go to a new default namespace (and would still be reachable under the non-namespaced name for older versions of Cargo).

I don't think Rust itself needs to know about namespaces (as in: johndoe/fuse would still just expose a crate named "fuse". Crate name collisions can be handled with Cargo's already existing renaming ability.)

Yes, then the issue of namespace naming comes up. I guess that would be less of an issue than package-level collisions or squatting, but still, you don't want any random person to get the "google" namespace for example. Which could only be avoided by either manual review or something like DNS based verification (which has lots of drawbacks itself).

[MrBuddyCasino]

> DNS based verification (which has lots of drawbacks itself)

Maven is doing this to great success. The namespace issue has been solved successfully, just copy what they do. It took years until they arrived at the current system, and it works well. What drawbacks are you thinking of?

[dthul]

My initial concern was that a DNS approach would force anybody who wanted to publish to crates.io to own a domain. In a parallel thread someone mentioned that Maven allows to acquire a "com.github.username" namespace in case you don't have (or don't want to use) your own domain. That might work for crates.io as well, since it already requires you to have a Github account anyway.