Rust should provide easy access to high quality crates

[aturon]

Point of contact

@carols10cents

Overview

Another major message from the survey and elsewhere is that Rust's ecosystem, while growing, is still immature (1 in 9 survey respondents mentioned this). Maturity is not something we can rush. But there are steps we can take across the ecosystem to help improve the quality and discoverability of crates, both of which will help increase the overall sense of maturity.

Ideas

Some avenues for quality improvement:

• Provide stable, extensible test/bench frameworks.
• Provide more push-button CI setup, e.g. have cargo new set up Travis/Appveyor.
• Restart the API guidelines project.
• Use badges on crates.io to signal various quality metrics.
• Perform API reviews on important crates.

Some avenues for discoverability improvement:

• Adding categories to crates.io, making it possible to browse lists like "crates for parsing".
• More sophisticated ranking and/or curation.

A number of ideas along these lines were discussed in the Rust Platform thread.

Status 2017-06-05

Completed

• Crates.io now has categories that crate authors can use to help crate users find crates for a particular task.
• Crates.io now gives crate authors the ability to add badges indicating quality. Current badges include build status from TravisCI, Appveyor, and GitLab, code coverage from Codecov and Coveralls, and issue resolution time and number of open issues from IsItMaintained.com.
• The Crate ranking RFC was merged and has an associated tracking issue.

In progress

• @shepmaster and @carols10cents have been working on, and will complete soon, a way to report build status of released versions of a crate on different platforms and different versions of Rust to crates.io
• API front page doc guidelines RFC
• Add a badge for crate authors to self-report their maintenance intentions - started in rust-lang/crates.io#742

Planned - short term

• Sort crates by number of downloads in the last 90 days
• Render contents of README on crate pages
• Have cargo new add a template README and template documentation
• Create a "Well documented" badge for crates in the top 20%
• Have "favorite owners" and highlight crates owned by your favorite owners in crate lists

[carols10cents]

I have updated the current status in the description!

[ErichDonGubler]

READMEs are now being rendered right? So...can we check it off the list? :)

[steveklabnik]

Yup, done!