I’m a bit sad that this is done before data dumps of crates.io are being released. We got them promised already some time ago and now talk is about removing data, not adding it :/. I got a ton of useful information out of the git history, mostly about the origin of weird bugs in the index.
To continue my whining, right now you can just clone the index, change the master branch to an older commit, and point cargo at it. With this, you can fool cargo into believing that only those crates exist, thus altering its resolution behaviour to match the particular time of that commit. That’s an immenely powerful and useful feature. I proposed an automated way of doing this here. If your time stamp could be in different branches, or worse, different repos even, this could be a bit of an issue. And even worse if the historical data gets purged completely, and one needs to rely on third parties recording the history or construct it artificially from dumps (it’s a bit silly imo that you’d then have to create a fake git history while the real one was just tossed away).
So in summary, let me say that I’m not a fan of this. However, I agree that wanting to make the “mainstream” cargo usage faster is a big concern and purging the history seems to achieve great things for little work, so I guess doing this is reasonable.
Similar to @kornel’s statement, I think that cargo-local-serve won’t immediately be impacted by this change.
