What do you think about the crates with very popular and generic names (like websockets) being abandoned and/or barely even popular?

134 points afl_ext 58 comments

Hello, I started learning Rust around 2 weeks ago and I noticed with time that there are many crates that feel at first glance at the name like the most popular and even official packages, but turn out to be abandoned, or not name-prestige matching quality.

For example crates like:

\- websockets - this name feels very official and I expected this is the official rust-backend websockets library, but it's not, its abandoned very long time ago

\- deflate - abandoned and efforts moved to another library which is supported and popular

\- rust-lzma - doesn't work on windows, author response to this issues is I don't use windows

I wonder if this is beginner friendly to leave such crates without maybe at least some deprecation warning, but I totally understand the rationale - the author claimed the name and it's theirs, forever.

So what is the community feeling about this?