Does crates.io have a backup plan? (lemmy.bestiver.se)

submitted 16 hours ago by patrick@lemmy.bestiver.se to c/rust@programming.dev

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It's possible that the .io cctld is going to go away [0]. Does crates.io have a backup plan at all? Does anyone know what problems it would end up causing?

I imagine the package registry having to move domains is going to cause a ton of problems.

Frankly, it's concerning to me that so much of the Rust ecosystem has chosen to standardize on shaky ccTLDs. The Indian Ocean Territory (.io) is a small island territory whose only inhabitants are a single military base, it is crazy to use that domain for something important. Serbia (.rs) is more stable, but they could still cut off access for non-Serbians if they wanted to.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io#Phasing_Out

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[-] unknowing8343@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 hours ago

What about stopping the bullsh*t of TLD nonsense and doing something like crates.rust-lang.org? It's the most sensible solution.

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 16 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

I'd very much welcome a crates.io alternative that doesn't require github and supports namespacing by username or org. The dependency on a proprietary platform rubs me the wrong way.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[-] patrick@lemmy.bestiver.se 13 points 16 hours ago

Forgot to mention .sh, which is also a ccTLD for a tiny island nation, and also shouldn't be used for hosting anything that is difficult to move.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.sh

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 1 points 3 hours ago

Saint Helena is in no way comparable because it's not disputed territory. Back when Mauritius became independent the British carved out some islands for their continued colonial use, breaking (back then brand new) international law.

Saint Helena has no such connection to another country and it was uninhabited before the Dutch settled. The Brits later conquered it but even if the Dutch want it back it'd keep its autonomous territory status and therefore its own TLD, the Dutch have plenty of those.

[-] GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml 8 points 15 hours ago

I seriously doubt they will actually phase it out, with such a popular TLD. They made an exception for .su, I don't see why they wouldn't this time as well.

[-] patrick@lemmy.bestiver.se 6 points 14 hours ago

I doubt they will too, but it's still dumb that an entire package ecosystem now has to hope that ICANN will make another exception and special case .io

ICANN tried to phase out .su, the only reason they didn't was because Russia was big enough to tell them no.

[-] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 7 points 16 hours ago

If the domain .io ever gets unusable, then all it needs for Rust / creates.io is to change the respository setting in the configuration of your project to point to new location. Maybe this could be done automatically through an update of Rust tools. It will probably cause headache for automated build systems and for newcomers, but overall its not as bad of an issue as it looks like, I think.

But I agree on that it wasn't a good idea to use .io and .rs as their backbone. It should have been .com or .org in example, where you know wouldn't go away ever. Not a fan of country level domains for important projects.

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 1 points 3 hours ago

Serbia isn't going to vanish any time soon.

[-] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 4 points 15 hours ago

Obviously this isn't specific to Rust, but frankly it's bizarre to me that ICANN chose to tie top-level domains to country codes in the first place. Languages might have made sense, but a major feature of the internet is that it's less beholden to political boundaries than most of the physical world is.

[-] Rogue@feddit.uk 4 points 10 hours ago

It's more bizarre that a single organisation would have such tight control over the Internet. Assigning a tld to each country is a good way to appease each country and give them autonomy over their own portion

[-] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 1 points 6 hours ago

But do they actually have autonomy, give that random companies can use .io and .ai? Or did the British Indian Ocean Territory and Anguilla approve all such uses of those domains?

[-] Flipper@feddit.org 2 points 4 hours ago

There are several cctld where the entity buying the domain needs to be a local. EU is an example for that. De requires you to be able appoint a representative within 2 weeks living in Germany.

[-] Rogue@feddit.uk 1 points 5 hours ago

Yep. The governments typically select who administers the tld and then get a lump sum or portion of the revenues.

For .ai it was 10% of their GDP in 2023 which is insane...

The registration fees earned from the .ai domains go to the treasury of Government of Anguilla. As per a New York Times report, in 2018, the total revenue generated out of selling .ai domains was $2.9 million.[13][14]

In 2023, Anguilla’s government made about US$32 million from fees collected for registering .ai domains. That amounted to more than 10% of gross domestic product for the territory.[

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ai

[-] jeff@programming.dev 4 points 13 hours ago

It makes a lot of sense for businesses, especially where different countries might have different regulations. E.g., amazon.ca and amazon.in. Both sites are in English but it makes way more sense to split them up by country.

[-] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 1 points 6 hours ago

Why top-level, though? Why not amazon.in.com?

[-] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 2 points 14 hours ago

There's zero chance they will get rid of .io.

[-] patrick@lemmy.bestiver.se 7 points 14 hours ago

Are you willing to bet the stability of an entire language's dependency ecosystem on that? Just so that we can write "crates.io" instead of "crates.rust-lang.org"?

That's really the question. I do agree that there's almost no chance it goes away as too many places and too much money depends on it.

[-] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 1 points 11 hours ago

Yes I definitely am. It's really nice that crates.io is short, and it's silly to give that up for a miniscule risk of something moderately annoying happening.

Even if the domain goes away we'd just have to all move to a new domain. Annoying but hardly the end of the world. Cargo.io isn't actually hard-coded in many places. It's nothing like if github.com stopped existing.