> It also looks like (soon) you’ll finally be able to configure global lints for a project. Until now, you had to hack your solution to keep lints consistent for projects. In Wick, we use a script to automatically update inline lint configurations for a few dozen crates. It took years for the Rust community to land on a solution for this, which brings us to…

Wow, as the author of that feature, I'm surprised to see someone was so passionate about it. I've found that many times I've been having to tell people why they should care about it.

> I don’t know why. Maybe the pressure to maintain stable APIs, along with Rust’s granular type system, makes it difficult for library owners to iterate. It’s hard to accept a minor change if it would result in a major version bump.

There is a tension between people wanting features and people not wanting to deal with version bumps. I've seen this a lot in maintaining clap, especially when it went from unmaintained for years to having active releases.

As for cargo, the compatibility guarantees are tough. Take the lints table. We can't throw in a first try, knowing we can fix in in a cargo 2.0. We are tied into the rust project itself which means we have the same compatibility guarantees. This is one reason we generally encourage trying ideas out in third-party plugins before we integrate them in directly since they can break compatibility.

> You can’t even publish a crate that has local dev dependencies

You can; cargo automatically strips them. However, if you tell cargo that there is a version of it in the registry (by setting the version), then it must be published. This is why when I redesigned `cargo add` for being merged into cargo, I made it so `cargo add --path ../foo --dev` will not add the `version` field. We do need to find ways to clarify that the purpose of the version field is for looking it up in the registry.

Allowing the dev dependencies to be stripped also helps with issues of circular dev-dependencies.

> However, many developers break large projects down into smaller modules naturally, and you can’t publish a parent crate that has sub-crates that only exist within itself.

We do have an RFC for this: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3452

The most complex part is the Index, figuring out how to represent it in the metadata tables we maintain so we avoid having to download every `.crate` file.

I also worry there might be tech debt around assumptions of there being a single version of a package when nested packages will easily break that.

> You can see the problem manifest in the sheer number of utility crates designed to simplify publishing workspaces. Each works with a subset of configurations, and the “one true way” of setting workspaces up still eludes me. When I publish Wick, it’s frequently an hour+ of effort combining manual, repetitive tasks with tools that only partially work.

I'm a bit confused on this point. While there are things to improve around publishing workspaces, I'm not sure how this relates to setting workspaces up or what problems they've had with that. I'd also be curious what problems they had with releasing packages. I don't think I've seen issues from them in cargo-release's Issues.