[mjw1007]

I get the impression that some people think of crates.io as purely a place for distributing arbitrary Rust free software, while others think it's also a place where people are building something like a community-developed "batteries included" standard library for Rust.

I think a fair amount of unpleasantness in recent years has come from this disconnect: some people think that by publishing on crates.io you're making some promises (that they might not assume simply for, say, having a repository on github).

To me, using an extremely generic name like 'base64' does suggest that you're in the second camp, and so that you might expect to have a conversation that feels more like "we're equals building this project together" than "I'm the maintainer and my judgement is all that matters".

[almatabata]

Don't all languages, that have this kind of community developed packages, have the same problem? I expect golang, npm and python to have similar issues. Python has less issues because they have a bigger standard library but if you want to do anything advanced you need third party packages.

I feel like most of these issues stem from the very young age of Rust (2015 -> v1.0). Give it a few years and these problems will stabilize as the long term crates will survive and the short term will grow stale.

[ithkuil]

Golang doesn't because all packages are namespaces by domain name (and more often that not that domain namespace ja GitHub which has its own further "org" namespacing)

[kaba0]

I think you are right. Though I think that one can have all the benefits of the “community-developed stdlib” with the namespaces approach as well — e.g. Java’s new Date/Time API actually comes from a third-party package called jodatime, it was just so good that it found itself implemented in the standard library of java, and then later on plenty other languages as well.

[steveklabnik]

Rust has done this as well; hashbrown was an external package, but now powers HashMap and friends.

[paulgb]

Great observation. This helps me reconcile the tension I feel between my “maintainers own us nothing” mentality and my disappointment with the way the base64 API issues have been handled.