Child Thread: Survey of alternative identifier designs for Cargo and Crates.io

IMHO, a human readable name is always better than a nonsense uuid, and different package owner that use the same name might make beginners hard to choose which crate to use.

Maybe there is a better way: combine crate name with editions.

Firstly, if you register a crate name that is never used before, you can own that crate name until a new challenge occurs and no response is submitted. Each crate could have 2 different crate names (for example, reqwest could also registered as request#seanmonstar, which has the right to submit challenge to own request crate. )

A challenge could be submitted by another crate with the same name and different owner, which is actively maintained in the latest 2 editions, and the challenged crate has at least one of the following conditions:

1. No updates in the latest 2 editions. In this case, the challenge cannot be responsed, and the crate name transferred asap.
2. No updates in the newest edition, In this case, the challenge could be responsed by publish an upgraded version in (for example) 90 days.

An official short name might guide users to use the correct crate, that's a very good feature and thus should not be discarded easily.