Crates.io and Cargo need namespaces, but the leadership flatly says no.
There's a big problem with name squatting, and nothing is being done about this either.
I get that there are more technically important issues around builds and reproducibility and the like, but this is pretty foundational stuff.
They are favorable to crate-name-as-namespace (so that once you have the tokio crate you can use tokio as a namespace) and there's ongoing work on that. But as said above, it takes work to implement.
There's no desire for other meaning of the word "namespace" because famously nobody ever made a well-reasoned proposal (despite the amount of social media outrage over the lack of namespace).
This isn't a particularly difficult problem, and other package ecosystems have solved it many times in the past.
And on the flip side nobody has ever been able to articulate (that is, not in a hand-wavy fashion) what do those actually bring on the table to make those extra costs worth it.
In a world without namespaces, how does anyone know google-foo belongs to Google?
At least if you establish "@google" belongs to Google, then you can be fairly confident "@google/foo" is theirs.
> (what if someone had created an Anthropic user name back in 2016?)
Lol. The world seems to be moving along just fine.
I don't think the problems you list are problems at all.
Meanwhile, the benefits of knowing everything under a user/org namespace belongs to a user/org are huge.
There are much bigger problems to worry about than this. Such as if a popular crate owner sells out to malware for $$$.
It's also much easier to control ownership and auditing of @tokio/xyz than it is tokio-xyz. The org can uniformly control permissions to all member crates without having one go rogue.
It doesnt. And nobody believes it does. That's the key difference.
> At least if you establish "@google" belongs to Google, then you can be fairly confident "@google/foo" is theirs.
In practice nobody “establishes” that, they just trust the platform for vetting the orgs (and they are right, because they usually do), so if you package manager uses the same formalism without the same guarantees, you're setting yourself for a bad time.
> Lol. The world seems to be moving along just fine.
You've just shown an example that it doesn't! If you have two packages "anthropic/claude-code" and "anthropics/claude-code" how is the user supposed to know that the scammy-looking second option is the legitimate one?
> There are much bigger problems to worry about than this.
The thing is that mandatory namespaces don't provide meaningful benefit at all.
> It's also much easier to control ownership and auditing of @tokio/xyz than it is tokio-xyz.
This is covered by the accepted “crate as namespace” proposal. It has the benefit of keeping a flat namespace by default and providing an optional namespace for open source projects like that.
https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/survey-of-organizational-o... is a start in just collecting existing knowledge in one place.
That's not true at all. They changed the policy a few years ago to disallow squatting and you can report a package as not doing anything, at which point they'll send the author an email with a deadline to respond, with the plan to remove the crate if there's no change. I actually had this happen firsthand from a package name I had claimed in the early days, forgotten about, and then gotten this email about several months back:
> Jan 29, 2026, 19:25 UTC
> Hi saghm, I'm a member of the crates.io support team, and I'm writing in regards to your pal crate.
> Our policies have changed, and we now disallow crates that have no functionality. The pal crate was reported to us as violating this policy.
> Are you still using this crate name? If so, please reply-all and let us know by February 12, 2026. If we don't hear back from you by that date, we will be removing this crate.
> The rest of your crates are fine and will NOT be removed.
(I responded back immediately to confirm I wasn't using the crate and hadn't been aware of the policy change, so they could take action immediately without needing to wait until the deadline)