[bnewbold]

This seems like a good contribution. It would great if one of these "lists of blessed crates" itself becomes blessed and sticks around! This list seems like it was created by somebody with "good taste", and I enjoy the amount of description.

https://lib.rs has some basic features to make it faster to sniff test various crates. Eg, I like being able to see a summary of the authors, and things like "maintained by RustCrypto team" just looking at the summary. My suspicion is that some concept of graph centrality (perhaps via authors?), and perhaps counting applications which aren't usually distributed via cargo (this contributing to crates.io downloads), could both yield a better popularity metric. But the trend stuff is pretty reasonable already.

Some related efforts at documenting pseudo-official crates (in contrast to gigantic "awesome" lists) are the "areweX yet" pages (https://www.arewewebyet.org/), the Rust Cookbook (https://rust-lang-nursery.github.io/rust-cookbook/), and the Rust Lang Nursery (https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery). Here is an ancient github issue from way back in 2014 discussing the idea of "official" crates: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/934