[brinker]

> The package system for the rust language actually relies on github, as many found out during outage.

This is not quite correct (although close to it). Cargo doesn't rely on GitHub, but it expects that there is some publicly-accessible git repository from which it can pull the source for any crate, and most crates use GitHub. So it's not a particular choice of Cargo, but a side-effect of GitHub's popularity in the community, and the fact that Cargo does not host source code itself.

[gkoz]

You're mixing up cargo features and the crates.io package system. Cargo does allow git dependencies but primarily you're supposed to use versioned crates.io packages, which are indeed provided by crates.io (even if they are actually hosted on S3 or whatever) not GitHub.

[agwa]

The crates.io index is in a GitHub repository. Does Cargo fetch it directly from GitHub or from a set of redundant mirrors?

[stouset]

If crates.io hosted the content themselves, it would just be the same problem, only with a service potentially less reliable than GitHub.

[kbenson]

Unless you set up a system of mirrors. There are plenty of examples[1] to draw from.

1: http://mirrors.cpan.org/

[st3v3r]

Not if they acted like a mirror. Put it on GitHub, Bitbucket, and crates.io