GitHub shouldn't be a dependency for publishing Rust on crates.io

https://infosec.exchange/@mttaggart/116806641273303255

by speckx • 28 days ago

204 75 28 days ago

Animats• 28 days ago

Sadly, that's probably correct. No outside single point of failure that can cancel users at will can be allowed to gatekeep open source projects.

sscaryterry6• 28 days ago

Especially not now, what if they're down? ;)

veqq• 28 days ago

This is a big issue. https://janetdocs.org/ handles auth through GH which leads to... regular problems, unfortunately. I hope to migrate soon.

ameliaquining4• 28 days ago

See the official project issue on this: https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/326

TL;DR: They want to fix this, it's a lot of work that no one's being paid to do, there's a roadmap with specific tasks that need doing, volunteer contributions are welcome.

sscaryterry6• 28 days ago

Just going to say it out loud :) Its been known for 10 years.

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

NobodyNada2• 28 days ago

10 years ago, GitHub had a far better reputation and the Rust ecosystem was much smaller and less load-bearing, so "what if someone doesn't have a GitHub account" was a theoretical concern for most people. So the issue was a low-priority backlog item that everyone agreed would be nice-to-have but there weren't enough people willing to volunteer their time to it over more important and more impactful work.

Obviously, the situation has changed in recent years, so it's now considered a much higher priority by many people and some of them are actively working on it. But it's a lot of work to be done by volunteers, so it takes time.

That's the reality of open-source projects: things get done when they are important enough to motivate someone to either fund it or work on in their free time, not according to idyllic roadmaps and schedules.

ameliaquining4• 28 days ago

Counterargument: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...

xboxnolifes• 28 days ago

A really popular saying on HN that's completely nonsensical under even a small amount of scrutiny.

DyslexicAtheist• 28 days ago

it's a lot of work that no one's being paid to do,

aren't they like some kind of non-profit (in the legal sense) that is still able to take a lot of money (from players like Google and Co, to justify fixing this), as opposed to ... say the Zig foundation, ... that is is also "non-profit" but can't get money the same way?

jojomodding• 28 days ago

The non-profit (the Foundation) pays for specific things but it is not really there to hire people to work on things. It pays for infrastructure work and to pay the existing maintainers who often do review work. It also gives stipends to up-and-coming contributors for Open Source outreach programmes, but this are not really the people who you want to have immediately work on your critical infrastructure code.

nottorp• 28 days ago

That reminds me tailscale still depends on anyone-but-them for identity...

epage2• 28 days ago

An RFC was recently merged to unblock this: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3963

The implementation on this has started.

Something to keep in mind is https://blog.m-ou.se/rust-is-not-a-company/. Rust is mostly driven by volunteers working on what they find interesting. Boring/uninteresting tasks depend on funding, a warm body to accept the funding, and a reviewer.

echelon2• 28 days ago

It's not just that this is boring work, but there's disagreement about Cargo and crates.io's direction. There are a lot of changes people would like to make that get turned down.

Crates.io and Cargo need namespaces, but the leadership flatly says no.

There's a big problem with name squatting, and nothing is being done about this either.

I get that there are more technically important issues around builds and reproducibility and the like, but this is pretty foundational stuff.

stymaar3• 28 days ago

Crates.io and Cargo need namespaces, but the leadership flatly says no.

They are favorable to crate-name-as-namespace (so that once you have the tokio crate you can use tokio as a namespace) and there's ongoing work on that. But as said above, it takes work to implement.

There's no desire for other meaning of the word "namespace" because famously nobody ever made a well-reasoned proposal (despite the amount of social media outrage over the lack of namespace).

epage2• 28 days ago

That and the existing reply are incorrect. Almost everyone has repeated the same superficial requests and design work and not dug into the problems to come up with a proposal that respectfully threads seemingly contradictory requirements (the answer isn't to be dismissive but to step through costs/benefits and explain why a path is justified).

https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/survey-of-organizational-o... is a start in just collecting existing knowledge in one place.

saghm• 28 days ago

There's a big problem with name squatting, and nothing is being done about this either.

That's not true at all. They changed the policy a few years ago to disallow squatting and you can report a package as not doing anything, at which point they'll send the author an email with a deadline to respond, with the plan to remove the crate if there's no change. I actually had this happen firsthand from a package name I had claimed in the early days, forgotten about, and then gotten this email about several months back:

Jan 29, 2026, 19:25 UTC
Hi saghm, I'm a member of the crates.io support team, and I'm writing in regards to your pal crate.
Our policies have changed, and we now disallow crates that have no functionality. The pal crate was reported to us as violating this policy.
Are you still using this crate name? If so, please reply-all and let us know by February 12, 2026. If we don't hear back from you by that date, we will be removing this crate.
The rest of your crates are fine and will NOT be removed.

(I responded back immediately to confirm I wasn't using the crate and hadn't been aware of the policy change, so they could take action immediately without needing to wait until the deadline)

eviks• 28 days ago

Except it is a company: https://rustfoundation.org/

And you forgot to mention the bureaucratic process that also blocks warm bodies from developing code because the changes are not/unlikely to be accepted regardless of the level of excitement

satvikpendem• 28 days ago

The Rust Foundation has explicitly no bearing on what the Rust Project does. They are not as related as one would think given the names.

estebank4• 27 days ago

Feel free to point at 1 thing that the rust-lang didn't do because the Foundation blocked it.

zombot2• 27 days ago

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3963

Ironically hosted on GitHub.

mikey_p• 28 days ago

The longer I go the more I have actually come to appreciate the way Packagist works for the PHP community, there are lots of cool things it does that I wish NPM or other registries did by default, like forcing you to package from a source repository, so that you can't upload a different artifact from what you keep in source control.

ecshafer• 28 days ago

How does a close source package work? Depending on the language its not super helpful, but a package that is closed source should be possible.

hmry• 28 days ago

For crates.io: They don't allow closed-source packages. But they're just the free community package index, you're not forced to use them.

You can:

- host a private index

- host the proprietary binaries in a git repo and use a git dependency

- commit the proprietary binaries into your source repo, and use a path dependency

steveklabnik4• 28 days ago

crates.io also only distributes source code.

kelnos4• 28 days ago

I'm not sure that really gives you the guarantees you think it does, though.

For example, I could push some malicious code, tag it, wait for Packagist to finish pulling it to publish a package, and then amend history to remove the malicious code, rewrite the git-tag, and force-push both to the git server.

This scheme makes it hard/impossible to push mismatching code by accident, but doesn't do much to stop a malicious actor.

estebank4• 27 days ago

This kind of thing is one of the reasons crates.io distributes source only, and that published crate dependencies can't depend on other repositories (that might allow for that attack).

jauntywundrkind• 28 days ago

The teams support may be a bit trickier/less clear to move on, but generally: this feels like a great place where atproto / bluesky support would slot in well.

dnfmfnfnfb• 28 days ago

I don’t see how that would be effectively useful for any aspect of the problems

steveklabnik4• 28 days ago

The only thing GitHub is used as on crates.io is as an identity provider. Using your atproto identity is pretty straightforwardly a conceptual substitute.

androiddrew• 28 days ago

Welcome to Golang packaging problems. Hope you get it sorted out

sshine• 28 days ago

But Sylvain Kerkour says Go's approach is much better than Rust's!

steveklabnik4• 28 days ago

The shape is very different. The only thing crates.io uses GitHub for is for identity.

bsder2• 28 days ago

Can someone explain to me why the inverse domain name solution that everyone in the Java world converged on doesn't work?

It's really not clear to me why people keep avoiding that.

estebank4• 28 days ago

1) Trawl registry for packages owned by domains.

2) Note expired domains and register them yourself.

3) Supply chain compromise.

That, and not wanting people to fork out money for a domain as a requirement to participate in the ecosystem.

Ferret7446• 26 days ago

Not sure what your mean, Golang has solved this problem. Packages are not dependent on GitHub, and trust and namespacing is done by domain which works really well.

vsgherzi• 28 days ago

I agree and so does the rust project. The main problem is that it's alot of work and it's hard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGS-HqcAvA4 Here's a long video from jon gjengset that shows how it works and some of the effort already done to de-couple from github.

Crates is widely used so it's a rebuilding the track while the train is driving kind of problem.

It's just not a priority for the project right now, but I would also definitely like to see the issue done. It might be good for the rust project to vote on things like this during surveys so they know where to focus work!

lorecore• 28 days ago

Go handles this well, kind of. It's super easy (in fact, transparent) to import from GitHub urls. You can self-host your Go packages, but it involves making and hosting some manifest files. Not as seamless as using GitHub, but still totally doable.

fyrn_• 28 days ago

In practice, Go is much, much more github dependent than rust, most go packages are on github

queenkjuul• 28 days ago

Aren't all the ones in the actual Go registry mirrored, though? I thought I read that. They also make it trivial to vendor dependencies, idk if Crates handles that

dboreham• 28 days ago

My take: publishing Rust crates shouldn't depend on any single internet property, including crates.io.

deathanatos• 28 days ago

I think crates.io is essentially just the default, and you can point cargo to an alternate package repository, if you so desire.

I've worked on projects where we vendored all third-party crates, for example, so our config just pointed to that vendoring, and I think support ought to be better these days…

junon2• 28 days ago

Correct. You're welcome to mirror or host a private one. Cargo makes it _relatively_ easy to do (saying this as somewhat of a cargo hater).

pyreko• 28 days ago

I mean... it technically doesn't? You can always point to other registries (or you can even just pull in git repos), we literally do this at work.

rho138• 28 days ago

Holy fuck it’s been a decade. Nothing is that complex.

adamch• 28 days ago

PRs are welcome.

junon2• 28 days ago

You do it then, if it's not rocket science :) or donate to the project, clearly you have a lot of it to spend by making demands of peoples' free time.

r2vcap• 28 days ago

From a supply-chain perspective, Cargo is still in the same broad risk category as npm and PyPI: installing packages means trusting externally published code, including code that may execute during build or installation.

Rather than looking for someone to blame - in this case, GitHub - we should focus on constructive ways to harden the ecosystem.

rndhouse• 28 days ago

I'm working on a tool for collaboratively reviewing Rust crate dependencies: https://github.com/thirdpass-org/thirdpass

Also supports npm, PyPI, and Ansible Galaxy.

kelnos4• 28 days ago

That's a separate issue of supply-chain risk, and crates.io using GitHub auth isn't really material to that.

The gripe with using GitHub auth for crates.io is that GitHub is owned by a large, fickle corporation with a (shall we say) complicated history with open source, and people object on principled grounds to being forced to use GitHub in order to participate in the crates.io ecosystem.

linzhangrun• 28 days ago

Cargo tied itself to GitHub back when GitHub still looked like an open-source utopia. Now the dependency is deeply baked in, and rolling it back would be very hard.

zombot2• 27 days ago

GitHub, just like NPM, is a liability of the worst order. I'm sure it's just coincidence that both are owned by Microslop. Anyway, having either of those as a mandatory dependency is a big no-no.

GitHub shouldn't be a dependency for publishing Rust on crates.io

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