Add a way to delete a crate that recently (~2 year ago) became obsolete

[wvwwvwwv]

E.g., I uploaded https://crates.io/crates/async-trait-fn for ergonomic stack-allocated impl Future usage in a trait, but it has become completely obsolete as soon as Rust 1.75 was released (async fn / -> impl Trait). Now, no GitHub projects use the crate, and no crates depend on async-trait-fn, but I cannot delete this crate since the crate was downloaded ~400K times in the past; I would be able to delete this crate after 30 years...

Therefore, I would suggest crates.io allow crate owners to delete a crate IF the crate has not been downloaded more than 1000 times per month "for the past 2 years".

[Turbo87]

this policy is an intentional choice to ensure that older revisions of Rust projects can still be built

[wvwwvwwv]

Understandable, but why 1,000? Not 10,000 or 100? I feel that the number 1,000 was almost randomly chosen because it is impossible to track dependencies of private repositories. A more correct solution would be to force a new crate under the same name as a deleted crate to start from a new major version number (e.g., delete async-trait-fn 0.1 -> new async-trait-fn must start from 1.0). I would say the magic number "1000" would not prevent old projects from breaking, and it feels like a half-baked solution.

[Turbo87]

indeed, we started with a random number, and then adjusted it until we felt we had achieved a reasonable balance 🤷‍♂️

A more correct solution would be to force a new crate under the same name as a deleted crate to start from a new major version number (e.g., delete async-trait-fn 0.1 -> new async-trait-fn must start from 1.0).

we considered that, but it has its own downsides too (e.g. someone publishing a final major version 999999999.0.0 before deletion to prevent others from ever reusing that name in any reasonable way)

[wvwwvwwv]

a final major version 999999999.0.0

👍 What a counter example 👍

Anyway, not being able to delete my old crate is not a big problem, but I hope there is a way to delete an outdated crate which had only been widely used for a short period of time.

• I also would like to note that the count of downloads is sometimes not pretty "representative" because many companies built their own creates.io mirrors for security reasons; async-trait-fn was also used in my company through a mirror that has never been accounted for in public crates.io.

[LawnGnome]

Download counts are an imperfect metric, for sure.

One thing we've occasionally kicked around is allowing crate owners to mark a crate as unmaintained/complete/obsolete/etc: basically, where it would still be in the registry and on crates.io, but with a banner of some kind up top noting its state, and probably with some sort of short-form free text field for the owner to note what should be used instead. Would something like that address your concern, @wvwwvwwv?

[wvwwvwwv]

That will be great, and thanks a lot for taking a look!