A crate may be a compilation unit, but it's irrelevant. Within the Rust space, a crate is a library. something like 95% of crates are using Cargo, and Cargo req

A crate may be a compilation unit, but it's irrelevant. Within the Rust space, a crate is a library. something like 95% of crates are using Cargo, and Cargo requires that dependencies are also using Cargo. Today it's impossible to ditch Cargo, and publish your crate with e.g. Bazel as the build system. There's no misunderstanding that what Cargo does it build Cargo crates. The problem is that it doesn't allow for sanely built (so not using Cargo) crates. > specifying dependency versions at build time Packaging for different distributions, where different versions of a dependency are provided, is quite a common thing, and has justifications beyond technical reasons.