Changes at the Cargo Team

Mar. 31, 2022 · Eric Huss on behalf of The Cargo Team

We are thrilled to publicly announce that Weihang Lo and Ed Page have joined the Cargo Team!

Weihang has been providing thoughtful and helpful replies on our issue tracker. He has often had the patience to explain to people what problem they're hitting and how to get unstuck. He often summarizes technical conversations clearly describing the available solutions and their costs both technical and more importantly human. He has also been contributing to many improvements and code reviews.

Ed has been a champion on many fronts. He has done tremendous work on toml_edit to push Cargo towards getting cargo add merged in cargo proper. He has brought clap to the momentous 3.0 release and continues to push on CLI improvements, more advanced testing tools, and much more!

At the same time one of the pillars of our team is stepping down. Alex is a programming robot sent back in time from the future to make sure that Rust succeeds. Alex Crichton has done more than his fair share being a keystone holding the Rust project together. Several years ago he stepped back from single-handedly running everything, to spin out many new teams to take care of things he did alone. The Cargo Team was lucky enough to be one of the places he still had energy to provide guidance, mentorship, and continuity. He is the last member of the team to have been involved with Rust since before Cargo existed. He will be deeply missed. Good luck on your next project of interest! Or, take the time to relax. You've earned it!

As a result of these changes to the team, the rate of new PRs is beyond our capacity to accept at this time. Reviews for PRs will be taking significantly longer than before. For now, Cargo will be having a freeze on any new features or major changes. We will still be accepting bug fixes and work on existing projects under active development. As capacity becomes more available, new features may be accepted after being approved by the Cargo Team.

Cargo is a large project with many moving pieces and different use cases. The fact that it works reliably and that it is intuitive has been a significant multiplier for Rust's success. But it also means that reviewing changes needs to be done very carefully. It is easy for changes to break some obscure configuration, or be a targeted fix that deepens our technical debt making it even harder to understand the whole of Cargo. We appreciate people's patience as we move forward.