Just found somebody uploading meaningless packages to occupy some crate name

meta
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This is the user on crates.io https://crates.io/users/swmon

There are 100+ crates and all of them are empty. It seems the user wants to sell the crate name in the future...

Shouldn't this classified as an abuse ? And is there any mechanism to prevent the similar things ?

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There's been some discussion about this here: Crates.io squatting - #34 by zachlute - tools and infrastructure - Rust Internals, and in a number of other places in the past.

If I recall correctly, the policy is to allow it, but potentially force giving up the name if it's not being used and another person has a more legitimate use for it.

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There are unfortunately several users that do this. strake and mahkoh are two other prolific ones.

The current policy is first-come first-served as described here:

We do not have any policies to define 'squatting', and so will not hand over ownership of a package for that reason.

i.e. there is nothing about what these users are doing that violates current crates.​io policy.

I did a rough count three weeks ago and found that:

  • 6% of published crates with [a-z]+ names are name squats
  • 8% of [a-z]+ names up to 5 letters long are name squats
  • 10% of [a-z]+ names up to 4 letters long are name squats
  • 12% of [a-z]+ names up to 3 letters long are name squats
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SO WE SHOULD ALL USE UPPERCASE NAMES NOW? :slight_smile:

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