The switch hasn't been sudden. It's just that many levels of disconnect between the project authors and downstream users meant it was basically impossible to communicate to all the affected users — nobody looks at their deps-of-deps until they break.
And they've released Rust as optional component you can disable, precisely because nobody paid attention until it actually shipped.
> The switch hasn't been sudden. It's just that many levels of disconnect between the project authors and downstream users meant it was basically impossible to communicate to all the affected users — nobody looks at their deps-of-deps until they break.
Exactly, from the original shitstorm issue:
> Rust bindings kicked off in July 2020 with #5357. Alex started a thread on the cryptography developer mailing list in December to get feedback from packagers and users. The FAQ also contains instrutions how you can disable Rust bindings.
> Do you have constructive suggestions how to communicate changes additionally to project mailing lists, Github issue tracker, project IRC channel, documentation (changelog, FAQ), and Twitter channels?
At one point there's sadly not much the project can do and still make progress.
Warnings are a funny thing, lots of projects like to turn all warnings into failing errors in CI, sometimes even at package build time, they think it's a best-practice ... but it means that nobody else can use warnings to communicate things, or else everything breaks, nullifying the utility of warnings.
The easy answer is to stop treating errors as warnings! I’m working on a project where for the first time in my career I’ve made my environment/workflow/tooling less shouty about problems.
I’m writing for my blog, so I installed a spell check extension. But its dictionary stinks. So I just turn off its warnings before a final post pass.
Most of the time when I see yellow in my editor it’s stuff I would expect to be red. Even from my primary language (TypeScript) which officially doesn’t even have warnings.
More things should be errors and treated as such! And more things that legitimately qualify as warnings should error in final checks to ensure they were addressed somehow, even with just an explicit dismissal.
"Sudden" is relative to the rate of propagation. Maybe we can say that the difficulty of communicating to all stakeholders of a package is egregious, and even endemic to the ecosystem as a whole, but it still sounds like a better communication effort could have been made, even if doing it perfectly is impossible
And they've released Rust as optional component you can disable, precisely because nobody paid attention until it actually shipped.