Rust developers have announced the discontinuation of support for non-canonical downloads in the crate.io repository on November 20, 2023, which use normalized package names with replaced underscore and dash characters. The reason for this change is to enhance reliability and optimize performance.
Until now, it did not matter whether an underscore or a dash was used in the name when uploading — crate.io automatically normalized such links. For instance, for a package named 'package_name' stored in the repository, it was possible to upload it as 'package-name' and vice versa. The repository also has protection against submitting similar names, preventing the upload of a package named 'package-name' if a package 'package_name' already exists.
The presence of the name normalization procedure requires calling a special handler, which does not allow the direct use of content delivery networks for handling package download requests. Additionally, iterating through options adds extra load on the backends and databases. Log analysis showed that non-canonical names are only used in requests from User Agent cargo-binstall/1.1.2, Faraday v0.17.6, Go-http-client/2.0, GNU Guile, and python-requests/2.31.0. The author of the utility cargo-binstall, used for installing binary artifacts for packages, has already made changes to account for the upcoming cessation of support for non-canonical names.
Source: opennet.ru
