Scoped packages (like in npm)?

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https://docs.npmjs.com/misc/scope

In JS one can use @scope/package. Was anything like this proposed for cargo. It seems it might help both in grouping related sub-crates of bigger projects, and potentially help with crate name squatting issues.

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I like this approach, and unlike most of the proposals for adding namespaces to crates.io, it’s additive/complementary.

I’d seen some earlier proposals for something like claiming a myprefixname-* / myprefixname_ namespace on crates.io, which could be done entirely on the crates.io side without making any changes to the Rust crate/module system.

Clearly that would come with a lot of caveats, like perhaps all of myprefixname* including the myprefixname crate being unregistered, but it seems like a simple, unobtrusive way to retrofit a namespacing mechanism into crates.io.

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Some standard counterarguments:

  • “This just moves the squatting issue to scopes”
  • “Unscoped packages are privileged over scoped ones”
  • “How do you map scopes onto Rust identifiers”

Some specific benefits:

  • Crates’s global namespace was inspired by npm’s (as the most recently notable package manager)
  • And this is npm’s solution to the perceived problems with a global namespace

Some specific drawbacks:

  • @scope/package is so great for JS because there is nothing special about require('@scope/package') over require('scope').
  • Rust would at least have to require lib = { package = "@scope/package" } or come up with a “mangling” that makes scopes special in Cargo-Rust communication

I’m neutral on @scope versus scope- versus any other proposed namespacing proposal. I still believe namespacing is useful, but doubt how much “author” namespaces will be used for “serious” packages.

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crates.io has 25K packages, and custom registries are now stable, so backwards compatibility is a serious concern.

Hyphen prefix seems like a workable solution with minimal overhead (becomes only a policy of a registry, rather than a feature requiring changes in the Rust language and Cargo). Previous post about it: Namespacing on Crates.io

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