Serde-yaml deprecation. alternatives?

[drmason13]

@jwodder

just glanced at that project's dependencies, and it seems to have added a number of irrelevant dependencies for no discernable reason, including openssl, env_logger, and figlet-rs. I don't trust it.

@asomers

Yeah, I agree. I'm preparing a PR to eliminate those right now. Also shady, the author didn't mention that serde_yml was a fork of serde-yaml until somebody mentioned it on an issue. It may have been an oversight, or me may have been trying to claim undue credit.

@SkiFire13

It's not just the dependencies. From a quick glance to the repository:

• there is a run function that seems to print ascii art and log some stuff to a file;
• there is an example build.rs that does nothing;
• there are various comments that seem AI generated (look for example at the src/main.rs file)
• the history is a mess. It could be just how the author works, but it makes looking around even harder, for example the commit that introduces a bunch of those useless dependencies also runs rustfmt on the whole repository, totaling 3k lines changed.

I prefer using the deprecated serde_yaml or creating my own fork rather than using this mess.

Closed Issues

These comments/issues from other users inform my sense of unease about the project. Looking again at some of the more recent commits, copyright claims have been removed and the main.rs file has been removed, along with some ascii_art error generation...

I do think at least part of the activity in the repo is AI generated. Could be it's gaming that bright green GitHub commit graph for portfolio/showing off to prospective employer reasons. Maybe they're just enthusiastically using copilot and just realised some of the output isn't particularly useful, I don't know.