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

dlight:

It would be nice if Rust had some way to specify whether a crate is done, actively maintained, passively maintained (accepts PRs but no first party development), abandoned, etc. A lifecycle setting on Cargo.toml is not a great fit for this job, because Cargo.toml can only be updated with a new release, and it often a crate is declared done after some years of no activity. But crates.io already has some issues related to this config mismatch, and they might be better solved together - for example, the README in crates.io can only be updated with a new release, and this is not always the right thing to do

There used to be a maintenance badge in Cargo.toml but it ran into the problem you mentioned. This Development-cycle in Cargo: 1.78 | Inside Rust Blog covers a little bit on the topic of this type of mutable metadata.