I can speak to the Rubygems case: you'd be surprised at how often people publish proprietary/private information, and then need to pull it down. It happens often enough to actually be a burden on the Rubygems team (at least, when I used to co-work with one of them) that they left 'yank' in.

> you'd be surprised at how often people publish proprietary/private information, and then need to pull it down.

But once published, isn't such information already compromised for all practical purposes ?

I can understand the legal reason behind "pulling it down" (using someone else's IP, etc), but practically speaking the private information once published cannot really be "undone" (at best you can make it hard to find, and disassociate from yourself).

Let's say you accidentally published your name, address, and social security number.

If it is only up for 1 hour, the chances that anyone malicious sees it is low.

If it is there forever, the chances that someone malicious eventually sees it approaches 100%.

What you are saying makes sense, but you are taking on the entire copyright argument with this logic.

Licensing problems or other legal hassles are also foreseeable enough that you'd want to be ready for them.

I think description should be mandatory

homepage, too

For what it's worth this is also true of NuGet:

"NuGet.org does not support permanent deletion of packages, because that would break anyone who is depending on it remaining available. This is particularly true when using the workflow that restores packages on build.

Instead, NuGet.org supports a way to 'unlist' a package, which can be done in the package management page on the web site. When a package is unlisted, it no longer shows up in search and in any package listing, both on NuGet.org and from the NuGet Visual Studio extension (or nuget.exe). However, it remains downloadable by specifying its exact version, which is what allows the Restore workflow to continue working.

If you run into an exceptional situation where you think one of your packages must be deleted, this can be handled manually by the NuGet team. e.g. if there is a copyright infringement issue, or potentially harmful content, that could be a valid reason to delete it."

(Source: http://docs.nuget.org/docs/Creating-Packages/Creating-and-Pu...)

That's great ! Definitely a argument in favor of Perl. Being more used to NPM (for Javascript) and knowing that you can (or at least you could) unpublish a package, I'm glad to see that with Rust, I won't have to worry about dependencies disappearing for no reason.

CPAN as an argument in favor of Perl? That's a new one on me...

Isn't CPAN for Perl ? I don't actually know CPAN. All I'm saying is that having a package manager that doesn't allow removing packages is an advantage IMO.

Yes, CPAN is for Perl. I'm just saying I've never heard of a particularly good experience with CPAN.

CPAN packages can't really be uninstalled (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2626449/how-can-i-de-inst...) and seem to be unnaturally prone to dependency hell.

I've had particularly good experiences with CPAN. Long enough ago I don't remember the details, and I wasn't doing anything exceptionally complicated, but I remember being favorably impressed and able to get my work done without hiccups.

Same here. Its infrequent that I go to CPAN and I am unable to find a package that will help along.

The concern about running the entire test suite on module installation really isnt a problem if you think about. Additionally you are able to force the install if it fails on account of a test.

CPAN dependency resolution seems worse than with other package managers for two reasons. First, CPAN prefers to install the most recent version of a dependency (rather than pinning to a specific version). Second, the default CPAN client behavior is to run the entire automated test suite for every distribution it installs.

While that behavior feeds back into improved quality for responsive maintainers, it takes additional time during installation. When combined with point #1, it can make dependency chains seem more fragile.

Huh, I can think of a lot of reasons to take a package down. Though I agree that "sorry you fucked up, too bad" seems a whole lot easier to implement.

Can you clarify this?

Generally, if you've published a package, it's possible someone has downloaded it. If you take it down, that's going to be strange and unexpected behaviour for those people.

Someone has maliciously posted a package with illegal content.

Someone has accidentally posted a package that contains a 2TB file, and now all mirrors have to sync it.

Someone accidentally puts their personal information in a package.

Illegal: There are legal ways to make that initial statement ("Cannot be deleted") false. If you're uploading a crate that offers nude pictures of random celebrities the guys at cargo.io will find a way to make this go away.

2TB file: That's .. nonsense. I assume guards are in place to prevent the oldest form of DOS attacks. If not, the guys at cargo.io will learn and .. make that go away?

Personal information: That looks like the only case where I sympathize with the guy uploading stuff. That said, this is how the net works? Publishing sensitive stuff to Github means that it might be out there forever (force pushing a new history doesn't mean that no one cloned the stuff before or just grabbed a zip of the current head).

For me its a win. I certainly can imagine some scenarios that might be painful, but .. that usually boils down to your third example, a developer error. The usual issue with 'removing packages' is that the user suffers. My gut feeling is that there are far more users that get 404s than developers that share their API keys.

There's currently a 10MB limit on uploaded packages.

there are a few possible cases of users suffering:

* you push a revision which introduces a bug

* you push a release which introduces involuntary API breakage

* the new release has a glaring security issue

* release X relies on a third party which has changed (think: some web service) and therefore doesn't work anymore

Sure, you can push a newer release but you don't want _anyone_ to be using the old one.

I'm not saying yanking is good, but maybe a notification system "this package should not be used, upgrade to XXX" would be useful.

Vendor guidance would be great.

If you accidentally published sensitive info in that package you may want to contain the damage.

Then contact the people that run cargo.io and see if they are sympathetic and what options exist in the circumstances. Setting a sane standard of "no, you can't fuck up everybody that has depended on your public package" is a good thing.

same with git rebase on master branches and yet people do that sometimes. there'll always be use cases for deleting a package from anywhere no matter what repo we're talking about.