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Request: Provide an official way to *deprecate* a crate. NOT yank. Yank is stupid

Rust Internals [Unofficial] April 15, 2026
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It would mean some kind of crates.io-specific metadata, but why not have maintenance status associated with versions? New compatible versions can mark old ones as "update available", maintainers could mark version series as "unmaintained" or "dangerous", and folks could become maintainers and "resurrect" a version series for $reasons. I think yanking is fine for pervasive unsoundness (i.e., some core API is unsound, not necessarily "a function that 'no one' uses is unsound"). This metadata could be used by cargo outdated and cargo audit to recommend actions.

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