| > that it cannot all be found. Do you think you can find all public Rust code? Like, if I'm teaching a Rust course, and put a hello-world.rs program on my department's public GitLab instance, under an MIT license, do you think I should also put that on GitHub? And register it as a crate? > the lack of any central resource that can be consulted. And you say that like it's a good thing. You want everything to be centralized on GitHub? If so, you want to force all research software developers to agree to the GitHub's terms, including those who are ardent free software advocates. You also prevent 12 years olds from publishing their Rust source code. (GitHub's terms of service don't allow that.) Or, do you also allow BitBucket [1], and GitLab [2]? [1] https://bitbucket.org/project_samar/samar_lite/src/master/ contains two Rust programs, neither on crates.io [2] https://gitlab.com/rouault-team-public/analysis/umaprs What about department instances of GitLab? [3] https://gitlab.anu.edu.au/mu/mu-impl-fast/-/tree/rtmu-dev It really doesn't seem like it's all that easy to find all publicly available Rust code. |
Why do you think a 12 year old needs to publish their "hello world" programs because of Crater? The purpose of Crater is uncovering subtle compiler regressions. If "hello world" is ever broken then it would likely be discovered by the standard test suite or generally long before the Crater run.
This isn't a matter of "allowing" anything. It's just a statement that yes a Crater run does test all meaningful publicly available code, where "meaningful" at the very least means code which is consumed via crates.io. Sure, there is very likely public code that exists elsewhere which Crater cannot find, and that's OK. The point is that a Crater run coming back clean means something, because a very very wide swath of code was tested.