Namespacing on Crates.io

[CAD97]

@anon2808951

the tiny amount of mental overhead having to translate from the crate name foo-bar to the name being used in source code ( foo_bar ) is a reason to avoid the crate. My line of thought is “If crate authors are fine with that tiny inconvenience, what other “tiny inconvenience” do they have in store for me further down the line?”.

This is already unrelated. lib.name is already unrelated to package.name. The package error-chain provides the crate error_chain, the package lazy_static provides the crate lazy_static, the package pistoncore-glutin_window provided the crate glutin_window.

That last one is actually the perfect illustration of how this "ad hoc" namespacing would work (and does, currently, for the ad hoc users!).

@anon2808951

It makes it impossible to easily upgrade a crate from some organization (that doesn’t maintain their crate anymore) to some fork that is being maintained, without having to touch every source file. One of the strengths of Maven’s approach has exactly been the ability to change old.unmaintained:package to new.maintained:package in the dependency file and move on without interruption.

This is not a problem, because you specify the package name in Cargo.toml, which is decoupled from the crate name. If the package old.unmaintained provides the crate package, and you want to replace it with package new.maintained's version of the crate package, you just s/old.unmaintained/new.maintained in your Cargo.toml and it just works the same as the substitution in maven.pom.

This is not anything to do with namespacing. This is the decoupling of package and library names.

EDIT:

@naftulikay

If I want to substitute github.com/rust-lang/rand with github.com/naftulikay/rand , there are no changes I need to make in my source code

This has nothing to do with how you specify the package. This has everything to do with the library name. These two things are not the same. Please, avoiding conflating the two will help the discussion. Changing the package provider of a library crate is the exact same, no matter how you specify the package.