[0]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/934#issuecomment-6...
It is different notion of "blessed" than the original proposal and, IMHO, a much better one. Steve's proposal is quite dubious, I guess. The problem is low standard for the word "blessed" here: in his proposal this badge has no technical meaning, but big social impact. Crate doesn't have to be superior in a technical sense to get this badge, it just has to be "famous", and stuff gets "famous" for various reasons. That's really bad and will get worse when Rust/Cargo will become more popular.
But that "safe/unsafe" isn't a matter of opinion anymore. If a library is known to be unsafe through the "safe" interface: it's a bug, and a crate shouldn't have this badge from a moment the bug has been discovered and until the bug is fixed again (or even longer, if there have been 5 such bugs over the last 2 weeks, even though now they seem to be fixed). It somewhat serves the original purpose (I assume), because it still means that a crate that isn't used heavily enough ("was downloaded N times over the last month") cannot be "blessed" — we don't have all necessary information to mark it as "blessed" yet, so it will help to set "junk crates" aside.
It's worth nothing if a library is made by Github, but is known to be buggy and to leak memory. But it is worth something if a "github API" crate made by John Doe is used by hundreds of people and didn't have a single memory leak for quite a while.
I pretty much opened this issue so we could talk about it, not because I think it's a good idea.
So you did a good job by starting that discussion. I hope it will have results.
extern unsafe crate phrases; // It's all UNSAFE!
use unsafe phrases::english; // But not English
Either way... I can see this going the way of try/catch/throws in java -- where the usefulness diminishes as lazy programmers (we're all lazy) end up polluting everything with unsafe (just like "throws Exception e..").
To me, it would be better if libraries using unsafe code were marked.