Shortlist of crates to remove

[fleabitdev]

I've taken a look at every listed ecosystem crate, and I've put together a shortlist of crates which I believe are obvious candidates for removal (or demotion to an "unmaintained" section). There are surprisingly few of them!

I haven't used any objective criteria. I've chosen these crates subjectively based on their most recent update time, total downloads, recent downloads, reverse dependencies, and whether or not the crate is explicitly unmaintained.

This is an issue rather than a PR, because "How do we remove crates?" is an unanswered question (see #95). Should we try to contact these crates' maintainers first?

2D Rendering

benzene-2d. Last updated in 2016. Minimal recent downloads. No reverse dependencies. Intended to be used with a single specific crate, benzene, which is similarly inactive and which isn't particularly game-focused.

elmesque. Last updated in 2015. Appears to be mostly GUI-related rather than game-related. Only two reverse dependencies, both of which are related to benzene.

3D Rendering

fbx_direct. Explicitly marked as deprecated, in favour of fbxcel (which is already listed as fbxcel-dom).

hephaestus. Only had a single release (version 0.0), three years ago. 253 total downloads. Appears to be very incomplete.

AI

aspen. Last updated in 2017. No reverse dependencies, minimal recent downloads. Seems to be intended for physical robots rather than game development. Explicitly marked as unmaintained by the author.

ECS

eccles. Fairly well-documented, but last updated in 2015. No reverse dependencies.

ecs. 15k total downloads, but last updated in 2016, and no GitHub activity since 2017. The author would recommend using specs instead.

ecs-rs. Last updated in 2016, and not currently building according to docs.rs.

entity_rust. Last updated in 2016. ~4k downloads, minimal recent downloads, no reverse dependencies. Author says that "there's no use for this project any longer".

nitric. Last updated in late 2018. 500 total downloads. "Status notes: highly experimental, unfinished, work in progress, not recommended for use."

recs. Last updated in early 2016. ~3k total downloads, minimal recent downloads, no reverse dependencies.

tinyecs. Last updated in early 2016. ~2k total downloads. Marked as [DEPRECATED] by the author.

trex. Last updated in early 2016. ~2k total downloads. Author describes it as "unstable and not ready for use in other projects."

Game Engines

darkengine. Only a single release in late 2018, no activity since then. Described as "in development". 320 total downloads.

nitro. The author describes it as "abandoned". Last updated in 2017.

Mesh Tools

meshlite. Largely undocumented. Only a single "unstable" release, in early 2018. Described by the author as "deprecated, and not intended to be used in a production environment".

Physics

chipmunk. Last updated in 2015. Very incomplete.

ncollide. Deprecated, and yanked from crates.io. Should be replaced with ncollide2d and ncollide3d.

Tools

ameda. Very niche - a crate for querying the properties of cells in 2D grids smaller than 512x512. Last updated in early 2017. 870 downloads, no reverse dependencies. No response to a recent issue on GitHub requesting that the 512x512 restriction should be relaxed.

Miscellaneous

The "Text Rendering" category is completely duplicated in the "2D rendering" and "UI" categories. We should probably either delete the "Text Rendering" category, or remove all of its crates from "2D rendering" and "UI".

blend probaby doesn't belong in the "2D rendering" category.

The crates beehive and hex2d should probably be moved from "2D rendering" to "Tools".

macroquad probably doesn't belong in "2D rendering"; it describes itself as a game engine.

glow should probably be added, in the "3D rendering" category.

[kvark]

That's amazing investigation work, thank you for doing this! Would you mind turning it into a PR?
Slight note: when figuring out the deprecation status, it would also make sense to look at the download graph. Some crates haven't been updated because they work fine, e.g. froggy (which is not in your list, just providing it as an example).