It’s possible that the .io cctld is going to go away [0]. Does crates.io have a backup plan at all? Does anyone know what problems it would end up causing?
I imagine the package registry having to move domains is going to cause a ton of problems.
Frankly, it’s concerning to me that so much of the Rust ecosystem has chosen to standardize on shaky ccTLDs. The Indian Ocean Territory (.io) is a small island territory whose only inhabitants are a single military base, it is crazy to use that domain for something important. Serbia (.rs) is more stable, but they could still cut off access for non-Serbians if they wanted to.
If the domain .io ever gets unusable, then all it needs for Rust / creates.io is to change the respository setting in the configuration of your project to point to new location. Maybe this could be done automatically through an update of Rust tools. It will probably cause headache for automated build systems and for newcomers, but overall its not as bad of an issue as it looks like, I think.
But I agree on that it wasn’t a good idea to use .io and .rs as their backbone. It should have been .com or .org in example, where you know wouldn’t go away ever. Not a fan of country level domains for important projects.
Serbia isn’t going to vanish any time soon.