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I'm sorry but a language that has data entropy and link rot built into its compiler is not appealing to me.

I prefer the Go approach which lets you host or import packages via a HTTP or git URI. If you have to have packaging built-in to the standard toolchain these days, then please use already well-known and existing protocols like DNS and git. Java also figured this out years ago (com.sun... etc).

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crates.io is package repository, cargo is a build tool, rustc is the compiler, and they all three are separate entities. rustc as far as I know operates solely on local files, and has no built-in logic or knowledge about crates.io. And cargo can be configured to use different repository than crates.io, which can have different naming policy

To be clear, you can always depend on a package from your own host, or from a git URL, today.

You can also make an alternative registry and add dependencies from that registry.

That said, an alternative registry that enforces namespacing would not work, just because of cargo's limitations on package names that prevent characters like /

It could be done by making every "namespace" a different registry, and for those registries to allow packages with dependencies from other registries (something that crates.io doesn't allow, for a reasonably good reason). Would be quite verbose for the user though.

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