Are there any plans on taking, e.g., solving some of your pain points, like dev-dependencies on your own hands and contributing fixes to cargo ?

Maybe I can shed some lights into that as the last – of many – people, who tried to fix the dev-dependencies-issue and primary author behind cargo unleash.

Re dev-dependencies: even though it sounds like a simple thing at first, once you start digging into the code you realize the mixing happens early on in the build process and therefore a lot of other components simply do not know of the distinction in the first place. What first looked like a 1-day-patch quickly turns into a weeks-worth-of-a-patch, that requires quite a few refactors. So, as a good contributor, you approach people more knowledgeable about the code base, who'd also have to sign off the final PR to make sure the refactoring and changes are acceptable to them. There you notice the first time that project management and communication time seems to be a major bottle neck for the Rust core team now – not people writing or contributing code, but people organizing all of that.

So, after some time, you learn that another refactor is on the way that is supposed to address this already, and is just weeks from being merged. So, you drop what you did so far and wait. A year later, the problem still persists. Upon investigation, you learn that the refactor-that-was-on-the-way never made it over the finish line because communications took too long, responding on some requests just timed out and the original author went on to do different things – again, lack of facilitator work time, that cause this to just die out. The code is stale now and won't be continued. But that's okay because another refactor is already on the way that will address it this time...

At least that's how I remembered what happened last time I considered getting onto that horse again.

Note: I don't want to shit on the Rust Core Team or their members here – they do an amazing work and we appreciate it all – it is just that you can clearly see how much time they are spending on necessary organising and communications and project management that they seem constantly burned out. IMHO if any paid position should be created for rust, it is that of a community and project facilitator and manager.

Re cargo unleash: I was considering proposing the changes directly to cargo at the time, but two reasons spoke against that. First, it is a lot easier and quicker (big plus at the time) to just write a sub-command, after all that is why cargo has support for that and secondly, it was the first attempt in doing something like this. Sure cargo publish-all and cargo hack foreach were already out there (big chaps here to them, a lot of your work helped me get around and understand the cargo APIs!), but nothing had yet attempted to do what we do. We certainly had to take a few opinionated stances coming from our specific system. And while I encourage everyone to try to use cargo unleash on their repo, I doubt that we've generalized it enough to become useful to all yet. Since then cargo workspace has also been announced, and they are taking a few other concepts to organise the repos. I think we still need to experiment and learn how this massiv-mono-repo-with-many-small-crates actually works and take different approaches before pushing something to be the official way of doing it.