Especially since a few users slurped up all of the interesting package names and refuse to give them up, despite many people complaining on GitHub. It's one of the huge warts of the cargo ecosystem it seems nobody on the rust team is willing to fix.

Who do you think slurped up the package names? It's not going to be random people.

This punk: https://crates.io/users/swmon

They aren’t the only one, but they’re… prolific in this area. A list of squatted names is maintained here: https://github.com/dtolnay/squatternaut

I think all packages should be namespaced per user. The language's core team could promote widely used packages to a "standard" namespace and give it a good name that way, thereby making it the "canonical" implementation of something.

I dunno how ecosystems keep making the same mistake.

All so someone can save few letters with typing dep name that one time they will be pulling it in into their project

The lack of namespacing in Rust is so weird. The discussion has been going for years, but it makes zero sense to me that after seeing issues npm and pypi faced during the past decade Rust is still pushing back against a more structured registry structure. Squatting will become more and more problematic the longer this flat registry approach persists.

Not only do they refuse to fix it, every time I've brought it up, they insist it isn't a mistake, and this way is better than, or no worse than, what Java does.