Plans to use crates.io versioning?

[drewstone]

Question
Are there plans to support crates.io versioning here so that this project can issue a compatible versioned release too? There are new projects integrating in the Polkadot ecosystem relying on crates.io versions now and they're incompatible with chains using git links.

[boundless-forest]

There was an attempt at PR #1241. So feel free to submit a PR to make changes.

[conr2d]

I agree with the need for better compatibility with crates.io versioning, and I’d like to address this issue. However, there are a few considerations to take into account.

If we switch the master branch to depend on crates.io Substrate, all downstream projects using Frontier will also need to change their Substrate dependencies to align with crates.io. To avoid disrupting existing projects, we could manage a separate branch, such as stable2409, which exclusively uses crates.io Substrate for now.

Additionally, I’m in favor of publishing Frontier packages to crates.io. If we move forward with this, we’ll need to establish a clear versioning policy for Frontier packages to ensure consistency and ease of integration.

[boundless-forest]

To avoid disrupting existing projects, we could manage a separate branch, such as stable2409, which exclusively uses crates.io Substrate for now.

I agree with this solution. What blocks us is that there are some test crates that Frontier relies on from the Polkadot SDK, but they are not published. As far as I know, it seems Parity doesn't want to release those crates. So, we may need to refactor or rewrite the test code in Frontier to remove these dependencies.