[marginalia_nu]

From <https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/>?

It's easy enough to keep your own website up as long as you want to, the liability is other projects and services, especially when the scope of those services is "archive everything for everyone forever".

[sophacles]

So your argument is you think the people who run the crates site don't want to do a good job but the people running kernel.org do? What info are you basing this random-seeming decision on? Do you have any actual data suggesting that the crates site will just disappear like you say?

I'd like to see that data if so -- I have pretty big doubts that your statement has merit without some sort of evidence.

[marginalia_nu]

As I said in a parallel comment, there is a fairly large difference between archiving your own project's history for as long as you feel like, and archiving the complete history of every significant piece of code ever written in a particular programming language forever.

Kernel.org's repository is also of major versions, not every minor release and patch. That really wouldn't do for cargo. If it has ever been released, it needs to be kept in storage for as long as the rust ecosystem exists. That's decades, maybe even centuries of passing on the torch and hoping the next guy accepts the responsibility. Hoping you can find a next guy.

[sophacles]

So vendor in the dependencies. it's a matter of cloning the dependencies repo and adding a handful of characters to your project's cargo file.

Now the lifetime of the dependency is that of your project. There's even tooling 'cargo-vendor' to help manage this setup.

Alternative of course is implementing it all yourself, which cargo doesn't prevent.