Rust's problematic reliance on GitHub

463 points whyvitamins

Is anyone else worried that you basically must have a GitHub account to publish a crate to crates.io? Or that GitHub must be available in your country for you to download your dependencies?

This means that anyone who's in a country that has blocked GitHub or where GitHub has been blocked due to sanctions is unable to participate in the Rust ecosystem. Or maybe your account has been blocked due to sanctions? Boom, all your work gone. You can't access your account now.

And even if GitHub was freely available everywhere for everyone, this would still be problematic, because the requirement of a GitHub profile to publish a crate only further incentivises centralisation of all code on GitHub. I hope i don't have to explain why it's problematic.

I love crates.io and cargo, and I see the convenience of having a package manager, but if it comes with complete control of an entire ecosystem by a single american company with one of the worst track records among technology companies... I'd rather just download everything manually tbh