Publishing clippy_utils on crates.io

[jubnzv]

Hello,

I am reaching out to inquire about the current status of clippy_utils and its potential publication on crates.io.

We have a custom crate based on dylint for our project, which depends on clippy_utils. Currenly, we use clippy_utils that refers to the specific GitHub revision:

clippy_utils = { git = "https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-clippy", rev = "1d334696587ac22b3a9e651e7ac684ac9e0697b2" }

I'm in the process of publishing our crate on crates.io. However, as cargo publish requires all dependencies to be available on crates.io, this presents a challenge.

I wanted to reach out and understand the rationale behind the decision not to publish clippy_utils on crates.io. Is there a specific reason for this, and would it be feasible to consider its publication?

Alternatively, could you recommend any solutions that other users have adopted in similar situations?
Thank you for your attention to this matter.

[flip1995]

The motivation for not publishing is, that clippy_utils is considered just as unstable as rustc internals themselves. When creating the clippy_utils crate for dylint we wanted to be careful not to suggest that clippy_utils is stable in any way, which publishing on crates.io might do.

Now, clippy_utils depends on clippy_config, which we also don't really want to publish, because it is a really Clippy internal thing, that is not useful to anyone. This shows, if we were to publish clippy_utils, we'd also have to publish all of it deps and future deps.

This adds some maintenance burden, as with every release, we would have to publish every dep of clippy_utils and clippy_utils itself. We would then need to add a README.md to it, in addition to licensing files and some other metadata.

In the end it boils down to us not wanting to provide support for any users of clippy_utils, as we don't have the resources to do so.

---

See also #6746 (comment)

[jubnzv]

Thank you! That seems totally reasonable to me.