I saw some other crate doing something similar but using wasm, the idea is to sandbox the binary used as a proc macro. So that seems a bit better. Can’t see to find it any more.

EDIT: Found it https://lib.rs/crates/watt

Over 2 weeks ago I asked about this situation. No reply yet. I wouldn’t be so sure at this point.

I would really like some more transparency on this topic.

Some additional thoughts (responding to myself here):

Say what I think with as neutral tone as possible and leave it at that

A hypothetical person might respond to this “But I have strong feelings on subject X!”

To which I respond: consider what effect your words will have. Inflammatory words will just entrench people’s position more, in both camps. People on the fence are likely to walk away from the whole thing out of disgust (especially if both sides behave that way) or take the side of your opposition.

Reasoned arguments in neutral tone however will rarely change the opinion of those who strongly disagree with you (there is a slim chance). But it might strike a chord with those who are on the fence.

A tendency for debates to get polarised is a general problem in modern society in my opinion, not just in Rust. Not just politics. Not just media. Pretty much everywhere. I have seen it here on lemmyrs.org as well in the discussion of the drama around lib.rs. But I don’t think calling out specific instances would do any good (rather the opposite in fact, as it might easily be interpreted as an attack on the posters person).

Well, Rust is MIT + Apache 2.0, so they can do this. It isn’t copyleft.

Personally I consider it a a shame that rust and it’s ecosystem isn’t at least weakly copyleft (e.g. LGPL or MPL) though there are some good reasons not to use those specifically. (LGPL isn’t not well defined if you don’t use dynamic linking, MPL is younger than rust, but would have been an excellent fit otherwise). And the ecosystem follows the leader for the most part.

But that is neither here nor there, and I’m not interested in arguing about licenses on the Internet. :)

Disclaimer: I love the lib.rs search and general UI. I don’t like crypto currencies.

I think the way to avoid drama is to be very clear and transparent in communication. In this case I think a way to do this would be to label data that lib.rs synthesised. Maybe a asterix next to corrected categories that on mouse over (long press on phones) says something like “inferred by lib.rs due to missing data”? Exact wording could certainly be improved, and might differ on context. Perhaps the synthesised data could be a different colour as well to stand out.

Having a list of packages that were filtered out might also help. Here I’m thinking a simple text file (set to not be indexed in robots.txt) with all the package names that have filtered along with the reason listed (e.g. “auto detected name squat”). Anyone interested could download the file and take a look, as well as contact you for corrections.

Ranking algorithms is harder to be transparent about (and it is not my field of expertise), so I can’t offer any advise here. Perhaps nothing is needed?

That sounds potentially useful.

I have wondered at times what ipfs was for. What can you find on it that isn’t on the normal web? What is the killer application for it (and please don’t answer anything related to crypto currency, I’m not a fan of those)?

Maybe this can help answer that?

All this drama is sad. I like lib.rs, it has better search results and easier to use UI than crates.io.

If it was me who ran it (and it isn’t) I’d probably include crypto results but put a big banner on top of their pages (and small ones in their search results) about me distancing myself from that. The crucial thing I belive is to make it clear what is happening, and to communicate clearly and transparently.

I wouldn’t reuse “deprecated” tag, nor use derogatory wording in general. While i agree with the sentiment that crypto is a major problem and rather useless, some of the wording lib.rs has used is rather loaded, and feels like it can be interpreted as akin to name calling.

I found that the best way to reduce drama in my life is to not get sucked in. Say what I think with as neutral tone as possible and leave it at that. Not always easy, but I strive for it (which is what I’m attempting to do here, and why I rewrote some parts of this post after reading it and thinking about how it could be interpreted).

Additionally, I hope the author will reconsider the move to closed source, because I dont think that will solve anything. Rather it risks adding fuel to the fire, since people wanting to argue will point to this and say “look, we have no idea how it works any more, you can’t trust it” (or even worse things).

Agreed, but I know there were complications: https://lemmyrs.org/post/52291

I don’t know if they figured it out, reported the issue upstream, or how much they debugged it are all.

But if it isn’t resolved soon, it might indicate that it would be better to move to a better maintained server.

Actually you don’t need to build your own. The rust on esp project provide a espup tool that downloads a pre built toolchain for Xtensa.

Quite the opposite, GPL is copyleft, while MIT is permissive.

I have done some small experiments (not much beyond a blinking light at this point) and I feel that the main issue right now for a beginner is that the documentation isn’t there yet. By far.

Also I have read that many of the crates that use the same bus don’t play well with each other (e.g. two devices on the same i2c bus) even though that is what embedded-hal is supposed to be all about. Many early crates are also abandoned apparently, further compounding this problem. I don’t have enough personal experience though to tell if this is true.

Many of us probably don’t need this enough that we pay for it. I could get by with just rust weekly newsletter for the news. Then there is the official forums if I need to ask a question. The main use I got out of r/rust (and now am hoping to get out of this) is reading and learning interesting things, perhaps answering a few questions along the way. Not critical enough to for me to pay for it.

This is in a sense a sad state of affair. But you are probably never going to get enough critical mass to build a community if you paywall it. All websites that use some form of paywall that I can think of started out free to build that critical mass.

An optional subscription though could be something. Maybe you get a special marker at your name as a bragging right that you are a supporter? A star next to threads you start? Something like that. Several sites pulled of that model (two comes to mind immediately: twitch, phornix (a linux news website)). LWN.net (also a linux news website, more in-depth though) is an interesting example: it paywalls it main articles for a week, then they go open. Again, it didn’t start out that way though.

I don’t know if the underlying software supports optional subs though, another option could be a simple paypal tipjar or patreon, but you likely wouldn’t get as much that way.