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I'd like to see radicle replace crates.io. I can't get over Rust's dependency on github/Microsoft, and I can't get over the lack of namespacing.

All you would need is cargo compatibility, and a trusted namespace that kept up with the metadata of the current contents of crates.io, right?

edit: I really, really like rust, and love basically all of their choices about the language, but I can't stand the feeling that I'm being tricked into an ecosystem dependent on one of the worst behaved companies in the world, and I can't stand that a lot of rust projects smell like GPL-washing.

That being said, git is GPL and radicle is MIT, so it feels like the same thing, but Github also ain't git. I prefer MIT to MS; if radicle gets important enough and decides to rubpull, there will inevitably be a Free fork anyway.

2 comments

* crates.io is moving away from GitHub-only authentication

* crates.io's attachment to GitHub is a fact about crates.io specifically, not the Cargo crate registry protocol

* Cargo's support for Git repositories is generic across Git and has nothing to do with GitHub specifically

* Radicle offers nothing to a crate registry that a Git remote doesn't

* and none of this has anything to do with the GPL.

It feels like you're just listing off things you like and don't like aesthetically. They have nothing to do with each other structurally.

> crates.io is moving away from GitHub-only authentication

Crates.io has not moved away from Github-only authentication, and got into the habit of yelling at people who complained about it.

> crates.io's attachment to GitHub is a fact about crates.io specifically, not the Cargo crate registry protocol

Is this just trivia you wanted to share? I feel like I covered it in the second sentence of the comment you're replying to.

> Cargo's support for Git repositories is generic across Git and has nothing to do with GitHub specifically

I'm looking to compile Rust projects from the semi-standard commonly-used crates. I do not want a Github account.

> Radicle offers nothing to a crate registry that a Git remote doesn't

Radicle offers peer-to-peer hosting that does not require a Github account.

> none of this has anything to do with the GPL.

Radicle is a project being built in Rust that partially reimplements git. Git is GPL-licensed, Radicle is MIT-licensed.

> It feels like you're just listing off things you like and don't like aesthetically.

I am unconcerned about your feelings. What I was saying is that I would like a peer-to-peer hosted, namespaced code repository that mirrors (or replaces) crates.io, and I do not want a github account to be necessary to use it.

> They have nothing to do with each other structurally.

I have no idea what "they" is referring to in this sentence.

Thank you for repeating yourself in exactly the way I was criticizing without really reading the criticisms. So, once more with feeling: Radicle does not offer the Cargo crate registry protocol. Radicle does not offer anything to do with crate hosting that a generic Git remote doesn't. If you want a crate repository like crates.io, you do not want Radicle. The best crate repository software is Cloudflare's Freighter, but if you were to implement some sort of distributed version, that's also an option, but it wouldn't be called Radicle. If you just want the Git support that Radicle offers, you can do so just fine without Radicle; it is generic Git remote support, and you can declare Git dependencies in Cargo.toml from Sourcehut or Codeberg or whatever. Radicle is a product that puts issue/PR tracking on top of Git. It does not have anything to do with what separates git dependencies from crates.io dependencies, it does not have anything to do with automatically mirroring existing hosts, it does not offer anything to the git dependency experience, and it does not offer anything to the registry dependency experience.

> Crates.io has not moved away from Github-only authentication, and got into the habit of yelling at people who complained about it.

This was me updating you on the present state of the world. Replying with the previous state of the world, as though this is somehow new and better information, without even looking up whether it was still true, is a level of deliberate ignorance I can't fathom displaying on purpose. Again: crates.io is presently in the process of moving away from GitHub-only authentication.

Does radicle have some way of storing binaries outside of the source tree? I know cargo compiles from source by default, but AFAIK it can (and does) download binaries as well.

AD: Theres a project `artifact-cob` [^1] that enables some of the functionality you are looking for. You can host artifacts off-network and make 'releases' that point to them.

[^1]: https://radicle.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/369274-General...

radicle-artifact is currently under active development: https://radicle.network/nodes/iris.radicle.network/rad:z4VYy...