How do we remove crates?

[icefoxen]

There's clutter-y chaff in some lists... corange-rs is 3rd in engines even though it hasn't been touched in 3 years.

There has to be objective criteria for removing things or else it can get contentious. One person says "We should remove A" and then the owner of A says "wait, why?" and there's an argument. An off-the-top-of-my-head idea for how that might work is, a crate gets removed if:

• A crate is unmaintained and has no commits for X time (6 months? A year?)
• And it isn't obviously useful in its current state (a crate such as an audio codec may not get many commits because it's basically done)
• And someone submits a PR for the removal

[mbillingr]

What objective criteria can determine usefulness?

Hmm.. maybe no such criteria are needed if the removal PR is required to contain a succint rationale...

[icefoxen]

I dunno! Any suggestions? :D

[mbillingr]

No good suggestions from my side :)

A few objective criteria that do not quite measure usefulness come to mind:

• number of recent downloads on crates.io
• compiles on current Rust
• declared abandoned by author/maintainer

[doppioslash]

We could grey abandoned crates out, or put them in a separate category.
There may still be useful code in them, for reference, so I wouldn't like to just chuck them out.

[workingjubilee]

I suggest having the lowest threshold being editions since those are a thing now: about once/edition, if it wasn't touched in ~an edition and doesn't represent a "finished work" that is thus "continuously useful"? It gets booted (or downgraded to a historical archive) without comment required. Essentially, someone who was introduced in 2019 to Rust (hi!) will be very confused by the code in a library that was written at the beginning of 2015, when Rust 1.0 was still alpha, so even reading those is less useful.

And from where I am standing, I still kind of blink at the idea of trying to use anything written before 2018. It's still legible, but I am cozier with the newer idioms.

[icefoxen]

That's... actually not a terrible idea IMO.

[PatrickHoward]

Leaving comment here instead of opening a new issue about this..
It looks like there are also some crates that have been yanked/discontinued from Crates.io... nCollide in particular (which has been replaced with nCollide2D and nCollide3D) is the one that comes to mind.
So might I propose adding another criteria for removing crates from the website's list?

• If a crate has been removed from Crates.io

[ozkriff]

One more case for the historical archive, i guess? https://amethyst.rs/posts/amethyst--starting-fresh

[stefnotch]

I propose at least having a the following rules

• if the the current maintainers of a crate clearly deprecate it (e.g. Amethyst, nCollide) => remove it or replace it with the new version
• if it looks unmaintained, fulfilling all of the criteria (subject to debate)
  • no updates for a year
  • author and maintainers don't seem to respond
  • not a finished crate (e.g. an audio codec can be a finished crate)

If a crate seems useful, but isn't being maintained, then it might be worthwhile to

• either remove it, since recommending an unmaintained crate doesn't seem ideal
• or point it out that it's unmaintained, and thus encourage people to step up and hopefully get the crate back into shape :)

I also think that the consequences of removing a crate too soon are not that severe, because re-adding it isn't hard at all. Instead it's way more useful to keep these lists a relatively current snapshot of the state of the ecosystem.

[coderedart]

This issue has been open for 4+ years now. what even is this blocked on?

I thought arewegameyet.rs itself was abandoned because it showed so many old entries like amethyst or conrod etc.. which are explicitly abandoned by the authors themselves.

The older projects just increase noise and diminish the utility of the website imo.

This is not an "official" list, so we don't need rigid rules for deprecation either.

1. Did the project have any updates in the past six months? No? then deprecate.
2. If the project is done. Then, keep it.
3. If the project is explicitly abandoned by the authors with an announcement? deprecate.

If the rules don't work, they can be evolved later. But listing the abandoned projects mixed with the latest maintained projects is just not the way.

[17cupsofcoffee]

I definitely think dealing with this is long overdue - at the very least it'd be worth us ditching any libraries that are obviously dead (ancient archived repos, etc), but I do think the rules you suggested sound reasonable.

I also think we're going to have our hand forced by API rate limits sooner or later, as the more libraries we have on the site, the more calls we're making into Crates.io/GitHub every time we publish (see #378).

I think the main blockers to moving forward are:

• We need to decide whether we de-emphasise the old items or just remove them (my vote would be for the latter, as I'm not convinced that many people would look at the archives, but I could be wrong!).
• Someone needs to actually do the work of figuring out which crates are in scope for removal.
• Ideally, we should figure out a process for pruning stuff in the future so that we don't end up back here in another four years...

You may notice that the common factor in all of these is actually having time to do the thing - everyone in the gamedev working group has been pretty busy lately, so I think nobody's really had the bandwidth to make this a priority.

[coderedart]

I am not in the gamedev group, but i can atleast go though all the projects and make a list of all the projects that are either explicitly abandoned (with a link to the announcement) or inactive for more than one year.

Is that acceptable?

[17cupsofcoffee]

If you want, that'd be a big help, I think :) Once we've got a shortlist, I think it'll be easier to figure out whether the rules need any tweaks.

[coderedart]

Name	Reason	Last Activity Date	Repo link
alto	archived	July 2020	https://github.com/jpernst/alto
ambisonic	no activity	Feb 2021	https://github.com/mbillingr/ambisonic
amethyst	archived	April 2022	https://github.com/amethyst/amethyst/
amethyst_network	archived	April 2022	https://github.com/amethyst/amethyst/
arcana	no activity	July 2022	https://github.com/arcana-engine/arcana
audir	no activity	Dec 2020	https://github.com/norse-rs/audir
beehive	no activity	May 2020	repo deleted :(
bmfont	no activity	Jan 2021	https://github.com/KalitaAlexey/bmfont-rust
building-blocks	no activity	Feb 2022	https://github.com/bonsairobo/building-blocks
calx-ecs	no activity	July 2018	https://github.com/rsaarelm/calx-ecs
caper	no activity	Jan 2022	https://github.com/shockham/caper
cgmath	no activity	April 2022	https://github.com/rustgd/cgmath
chariot	no activity	April 2018	https://github.com/ChariotEngine/Chariot
coffee	no activity	May 2020	https://github.com/hecrj/coffee
conrod	abandoned	Jan 2022	https://github.com/pistondevelopers/conrod
const-tweaker	no activity	Aug 2021	https://github.com/tversteeg/const-tweaker
corange-rs	no activity	2015	https://github.com/lucidscape/corange-rs
crayon	no activity	May 2019	https://github.com/shawnscode/crayon
crow	no activity	Oct 2021	https://github.com/lcnr/crow
crystalorb	no activity	Jan 2022	https://github.com/ErnWong/crystalorb
dces	no activity	May 2022	https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/dces-rust
distill	no activity	Nov 2021	https://github.com/amethyst/distill
MuOxi	no activity	Sep 2021	https://github.com/duysqubix/MuOxi
ears	no activity	April 2020	https://github.com/nickbrowne/ears
enet	no activity	March 2022	https://github.com/futile/enet-rs
euler	no activity	June 2018	https://github.com/alteous/euler
ezing	no activity	Nov 2018	https://github.com/michaelfairley/ezing
fmod	no activity	July 2021	https://github.com/GuillaumeGomez/rust-fmod
froggy	no activity	Sep 2020	https://github.com/kvark/froggy
fungui	no activity	Jan 2019	https://github.com/thinklibs/fungui
gfx-hal	maintenance mode	Aug 2021	https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx
glsp	on hold	Mar 2020	https://github.com/fleabitdev/glsp/
gme	no activity	Mar 2021	https://github.com/JayPavlina/Game-Music-Emu-Rust
graco	no activity	Feb 2020	https://gitlab.com/chrisrabotin/graco
hlua	no activity	Oct 2018	https://github.com/tomaka/hlua
vulkust	abandoned	Aug 2022	https://github.com/Hossein-Noroozpour/vulkust
rust-3d	no activity	Aug 2020	https://github.com/I3ck/rust-3d
imgui-ext	no activity	Nov 2020	https://github.com/germangb/imgui-ext
imgui-inspect	no activity	April 2021	https://github.com/aclysma/imgui-inspect
immi	no activity	July 2018	https://github.com/tomaka/immi
netcode	no activity	June 2020	https://github.com/jaynus/netcode.io
keeshond	no activity	May 2022	https://gitlab.com/cosmicchipsocket/keeshond
keeshond_datapack	no activity	May 2022	https://gitlab.com/cosmicchipsocket/keeshond
ketos	no activity	Jan 2020	https://github.com/murarth/ketos
laminar	no activity	April 2022	https://github.com/TimonPost/laminar
legion	no activity	Oct 2021	https://github.com/amethyst/legion
libovr	no activity	2016	https://github.com/lucidscape/libovr-rs
lichen	no activity	April 2022	https://github.com/viperscape/lichen
liquidfun	no activity	2015	https://github.com/rjanicek/liquidfun-rust
luajit	no activity	Feb 2019	https://gitlab.com/Dreae/luajit-rs
mold2d	no activity	Dec 2018	https://github.com/DarinM223/mold2d
molt	no activity	May 2020	https://github.com/wduquette/molt
navmesh	no activity	Dec 2021	https://github.com/PsichiX/navmesh
ncollide2d	passively maintained	Mar 2022	https://github.com/dimforge/ncollide
ncollide3d	passively maintained	Mar 2022	https://github.com/dimforge/ncollide
netstack	no activity	April 2020	https://github.com/Vengarioth/netstack
nphysics2d	passively maintained	July 2021	https://github.com/dimforge/nphysics
nphysics3d	passively maintained	July 2021	https://github.com/dimforge/nphysics
nuklear-rust	no activity	Oct 2020	https://github.com/snuk182/nuklear-rust
obj	no activity	Jun 2021	https://github.com/kvark/obj
ogmo3	no activity	Aug 2021	https://github.com/17cupsofcoffee/ogmo3
optimath	no activity	Jun 2021	https://github.com/djugei/optimath/
oxygen_quark	no activity	Jan 2019	repo deleted
peacock	no activity	April 2021	https://github.com/maxdeviant/peacock
physme	archived	Dec 2021	https://github.com/soycan-sim/physme
portmidi	no activity	May 2022	https://github.com/musitdev/portmidi-rs
pyro	archived	Aug 2022	https://github.com/MaikKlein/pyro
pyxel	no activity	Jul 2019	https://github.com/adtennant/pyxel
quicksilver	no activity	Oct 2020	https://github.com/ryanisaacg/quicksilver
raui	no activity	Nov 2021	https://github.com/RAUI-labs/raui
rendy	no activity	Jan 2021	https://github.com/amethyst/rendy
rhusics	no activity	Aug 2020	https://github.com/rustgd/rhusics
rovr	no activity	2015	https://github.com/binsoftware/rovr
vitral	no activity	Aug 2018	https://github.com/rsaarelm/vitral
rsoundio	abandoned	Dec 2020	https://github.com/klingtnet/rsoundio
rust-webvr	abandoned	May 2020	https://github.com/servo/rust-webvr
sharecart1000	no activity	Mar 2021	https://github.com/Lokathor/sharecart1000-rs
steering	no activity	Sep 2018	https://github.com/orhanbalci/rust-steering-behaviors
tachyon-networking	no activity	Feb 2022	https://github.com/gamemachine/tachyon-networking
tcod	no activity	Jan 2021	https://github.com/tomassedovic/tcod-rs
tessellation	no activity	Jun 2021	https://github.com/hmeyer/tessellation
three	abandoned	Sept 2022	https://github.com/three-rs/three
throne	no activity	Oct 2021	https://github.com/t-mw/throne
torchbear (renamed jazz)	no activity	April 2022	https://github.com/jazzdotdev/jazz
vorbis	no activity	2016	https://github.com/tomaka/vorbis-rs
weasel	no activity	Nov 2020	https://github.com/Trisfald/weasel
wrapped2d	no activity	May 2020	https://github.com/Bastacyclop/rust_box2d
wrapping_coords2d	no activity	May 2022	https://github.com/facorread/wrapping_coords2d
natura	no activity	Feb 2022	https://github.com/ziyasal/natura

That too way longer than expected. Anyway, i left some repos alone if i felt like they were sort-of complete or still popularly used. eg: gl wrappers or codec decoders.

These are in alphabetical order, so cleaning up in a PR should be pretty straight forward. When i mean no activity, i generally mean that there was no commit or issue comment etc.. by the author since last july (roughly one year). If the repo is missing, then i used the crates.io last version published date instead.

If any of these sleeping projects wake up, then we can re-add them :)

[17cupsofcoffee]

That list looks fairly reasonable to me - there's only a few I've spotted that could be contentious:

• amethyst - could be worth keeping purely for how historically relevant it is to the ecosystem?
• bmfont - pretty commonly used format (though https://github.com/shampoofactory/bmfont_rs is more recently updated and has a more idiomatic API, so maybe let's just add that instead)
• cgmath - still fairly widely used as it's stable and has been around for a long time
• ezing - feels fairly 'done', not sure how much you could really add to this other than more easing functions

As far as I can tell, most of the others are not being developed and/or have been superceded by other crates.

I'll try to see if any other WG members have any strong opinions on this.

[coderedart]

I found #372 . So, it seems we already removed a bunch of crates in 2020.

amethyst - I don't think users who come to arewegameyet are looking for historically relevant crates. They probably want to look at what rust ecosystem offers them today.

cgmath - I just thought it would better to redirect users towards glam/euclid/nalgebra which are still maintained. But I will leave this to the judgement of WG members.

[stefnotch]

I honestly don't mind either way, and just to get things going, I'll propose:

Do all the non-contentious ones first, and discuss amethyst and cgmath after that.

For amethyst and cgmath, we even have the option of listing them (since they're high up in Google searches) and explicitly pointing the readers to the newer ones.

[coderedart]

blocked on #546 which might be merged before summer 👍

[17cupsofcoffee]

blocked on #546 which might be merged before summer 👍

Sorry for the delay on this, I've not forgotten! I need to find a new reviewer for the PR since Ozkriff's no longer available.

Once that PR is merged, my plan is to take the list of crates that Jubilee had removed in their (now-closed) PR, and move them all into the archive section.

If we decide later down the line we do want to go down the route of removing crates entirely, it'll be easy to find them (since they'll all be tagged as archived = true), but hopefully this by itself is a good first step towards cleaning the site up - I agree it's long overdue.

[17cupsofcoffee]

#546 is merged now¹, so hopefully we can get this moving again in 2024 🎆

I've re-raised @workingjubilee's PR using the new archive functionality - I'd appreciate it if people in this thread could give it a look over and make sure I've not missed/broken anything 😄

• Archive crates confirmed as dead #556

Once this is merged, we can maybe take a look at archiving some more of the crates mentioned here: #95 (comment)

Given that we're just de-emphasizing crates now instead of removing them from the site entirely, hopefully there'll be a bit more consensus about which ones should be moved.

Footnotes

1. I had to use admin rights to do it, which I feel a bit uncomfortable about, but nobody other than me is reviewing changes at the moment and I really don't want this issue to be blocked for a sixth year... ↩

[17cupsofcoffee]

#556 is merged as well now :)

Further PRs to archive crates that are unambigiously dead/unmaintained would be welcomed.