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

This request of mine is more about library maintainers/authors willfully, explicitly choose to deprecate a package or a version of a package. It's not about automatically and implicitly burdening them with false activities.

In other words, this proposal of mine is focusing more on the side of active library authors/maintainers than on the users of the libraries.

epage:

I could also see crates.io emailing the pubishers letting them know certain crates will be leaving the grace window soon unless some activity is present, linking to a "I'm still here" link.

If crates.io really does that, I could see a controversy from miles away. Many would be annoyed. I myself would hate this.

If the users really want to see maintainence status of a package, they should check the git activities themselves, and compare it with issues, pull requests, the size of the codebase, the completeness of the APIs, etc. all by themselves (or some automated tools).

Anyway, it'd be nice if the discussion could focus back on cargo deprecate vs. cargo yank.