How can I tell if a Rust library is deprecated?

Question

I am looking for a Rust library to parse dates and I found the documentation for time which looks official.

I wanted to report a bug so I went to the Crates.io page , which led me to the Github repository which sneakily redirected to the rust-deprecated Github account .

Is this library deprecated or not? How can I find out? There's no indication in the documentation or the code.

Answer 1

One problem here is that libraries often become deprecated because the maintainer doesn't have time. So the person who has the power to say "deprecated" also isn't in the position to do it.

The next release of Rust (1.9) will contain a "deprecated" attribute, which would allow someone to mark any part of an API as deprecated, and I guess it could be applied to a whole crate too.

That said, for "time", "deprecated" has a very specific meaning: it's a crate that was almost official, but is not any more, and has not had a new maintainer yet. If anyone wants to take over maintenance, they can request it, and it will be given to them. This only applies to crates that are in the rust-lang-nursery organization, and even that is a bit of history. In the future, I doubt many crates will end up "deprecated" in this way.