Change a published crate's canonincal name from hyphen to underscore or vice versa (once cargo recognizes either)

[Fraser999]

I mistakenly published a crate with a trailing _sys in its name instead of -sys. I can't now publish under the correct name as this is identified as a rename which is forbidden.

The ideal situation would be to rename the _sys crate, but failing that, is it possible to delete it and republish under the correct name?

The crate in question is https://crates.io/crates/maidsafe_libsodium_sys.

This relates to https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/pre-rfc-hyphens-in-crate-names-redux/1655. If that RFC were accepted and implemented, this wouldn't be an issue I guess?

[alexcrichton]

I can delete crates manually (allowing a re-publishing), but I do agree it would be nice to have the ability to do this automatically in some whitelisted scenarios.

Feel free to reach out to me on IRC (acrichto) if you want me to delete the crate to allow a republish.

[aidanhs]

This would also be useful for trying out releasing without permanently polluting crates.io (exposing the staging crates.io index somewhere for use with cargo publish --host would also work I think - I couldn't see it anywhere).

[ducks]

Did anyone have more thoughts on how this would work?

How does the --host thing sound? Maybe a --dry-run type flag that does everything up to the upload point? And I've never actually published a crate but is there a confirmation before pushing it up?

[Kerollmops]

up someone ? I have published some crates that doesn't work and was renamed.

[ostrokach]

I ran into this problem too. I pushed a bunch of packages to crates.io before realizing that it'd be more useful if they were combined into a single package. I ended up yanking those packages, but they still show up on my dashboard.

Would it be possible to add an option to permanently delete packages which don't have other packages depending on them? This would prevent packages that you require from randomly being pulled from crates.io, but would allow people starting out to delete / rename their packages at will?

[carols10cents]

Would it be possible to add an option to permanently delete packages which don't have other packages depending on them?

The packages that depend on the yanked crates might not be on crates.io :(

@alexcrichton wdym you delete people's crates from the database for them?!?!? doesn't this break reproducible builds????

I think NPM's current policy is to only allow deletion within 24 hours of publishing... I'm checking on that.

Rename... I could see a case for leaving the old crate where it is for install purposes, but allowing someone to change the name and have /crate/oldname redirect to /crate/newname with a notice at the top or something...

[carols10cents]

Aha, here's npm's current policy: http://blog.npmjs.org/post/141905368000/changes-to-npms-unpublish-policy

[steveklabnik]

Rename... I could see a case for leaving the old crate where it is for install purposes, but allowing someone to change the name and have /crate/oldname redirect to /crate/newname with a notice at the top or something...

I'd be in favor of treating rename as a specifc kind of yank, that is, the old one would stay, but you couldn't depend on it; you'd get the new one.

[alexcrichton]

@carols10cents in general yeah it'd cause breakage (e.g. to delete libc), but deleting a crate with 0 downloads and one user is unlikely to break anyone when the one user asks for it :)

[C4K3]

An alternative solution to this problem: Allow owners of crates to set them to hidden, so they by default don't show up on searches on crates.io, and have a "Show hidden crates" checkbox or something when searching.

This would maintain the crates never get deleted policy, while significantly reducing the annoyance from unmaintained crates.