It was my first FOSDEM, and I managed to see everything I wanted on my schedule. I met a man from Poland in the tramway the first day and apparently, it's not supposed to be possible (but he was right about there are always two talks you want to see at the same time). I just wish Lennart had enough time to talk about everything he planned, I need to learn more about mkosi.
Anyway, my only regret was not able to stay longer to meet other contributors due to my trains constraints. I didn't plan anything, I need to do better.
There have been project that has been forked for these reasons. They never go anywhere because the people forking are not involved in the original community as dev.
As one packaging Go daily for a distro, this doesn't surprise me (though thanks God we are not affected, probably because we unbundle everything and the license for each lib is then verified). Contrary to the Rust ecosystem, there is no central repo location or Cargo.toml that easily allow to parse the licenses used. So no cargo license commands. For static binaries we build, we don't have the entire set of licenses because the chain of dependencies can reach up to 650 packages.
I think it all boil down to manpower. Rust crates need a limited set of compat packages and have a way smaller ecosystem than nodejs. Node developers tend to use as many dependencies they can, resulting in hundreds of deps per app. Rust programs have generally less than 10 direct dependencies, and at worst less than a hundred indirect dependencies, so it is still manageable.
Reading this I'm glad I'm working on Fedora.: one git per package, one tool to rule them all (fedpkg), one tool to sync them all locally (grokmirror), (relatively) easy global changes through proven packagers who can ask for mass changes before each release.
I don't know how I would do it if I had to deal with svn, mercurial or no scm at all. I understand the want of being decentralized but this is being done at the maintainers expense, who are often already stretched thing.
I personally hope this won't catch on because some third party library still expect master to be the default branch. When main is used, I have to monkeypatch some script I use to work aroud it.
edit: I fixed the script to use branch [0] instead of branch master (using GitPython).