I'm really not a fan of the "download the prebuilt binary from github releases" workflow that's been proliferating along with the popularity of Rust. It seems like a step backward in terms of secure package management, and it's surprising to me that Rust doesn't offer a more out-of-box experience for this, instead encouraging users to build from source. I understand the arguments for this, and I even find some of them convincing - namely, that the inverse problem of opaque intermediate binaries and object files would be much worse as it would cause a cascade of brittle builds and barely any packages would work.
But the fact remains that end users want to download a binary, and the common approach to this is to simply publish them to GitHub actions. Surely Cargo could offer a better option than this, while retaining the ability to build all packages from source (maybe you can only publish binaries to Cargo _in addition_ to the source files... or maybe Cargo.toml could include a link to GitHub releases, and Cargo could include a command for downloading directly from there.)
In the meantime, I've been considering publishing Rust binaries to npm (in addition to GitHub releases). I got the idea from esbuild, which is written in Go but distributed via npm. What do people think of this approach? Here's a recent blog post [0] describing the setup.
But the fact remains that end users want to download a binary, and the common approach to this is to simply publish them to GitHub actions. Surely Cargo could offer a better option than this, while retaining the ability to build all packages from source (maybe you can only publish binaries to Cargo _in addition_ to the source files... or maybe Cargo.toml could include a link to GitHub releases, and Cargo could include a command for downloading directly from there.)
In the meantime, I've been considering publishing Rust binaries to npm (in addition to GitHub releases). I got the idea from esbuild, which is written in Go but distributed via npm. What do people think of this approach? Here's a recent blog post [0] describing the setup.
[0] https://blog.orhun.dev/packaging-rust-for-npm/