say hi to dist, or, cargo-dist no more!

cargo-dist hasn't been just for Cargo for awhile now, and our support for other languages has been getting better by leaps and bounds. Until now, though, we've been between two worlds: we still advertise ourselves as Cargo-dist, and it wasn't actually possible to run cargo-dist without Cargo.

We've already shipped a few features building up to this, such as 0.23.0's new config format. With 0.24.0, we've achieving two major milestones at once: we've completely removed the need to have Cargo installed to use cargo-dist, and we've introduced the new name "dist". The new name reflects that dist isn't just a tool for building Cargo software — we always want to be the best tool for building Rust software, but we want you to know we're there for your other languages too.

When called as dist, the new release works without Cargo so long as your app is written in a non-Rust language. (We still need Cargo, for now, to be able to read information about Cargo workspaces. That's true even if you're just running dist init and aren't actually building your software.) dist still installs an alias under the name cargo-dist, and it still works as a Cargo plugin. If you have muscle memory for the old name or just find yourself preferring to call it as cargo dist, that will keep working. Our installation packages currently still use the original name (for example brew install cargo-dist), but these will also be migrated to the new name in the future.

This change is a major step along the pathway to being fully renamed. Look forward to some more changes coming on the way to dist 1.0 — including a new default install directory that will make us fully independent of ~/.cargo. Keep an eye out for the new improvements coming and, until then, happy disting!