It's been less than two weeks, and we're already back with a big dist release for you. This release has several major features, beginning with the biggest news that:

dist has a new name

Did the last paragraph give it away? Well, it's true: cargo-dist is now just dist. This reflects our growing support for packaging software built by tools beyond just Cargo. Our support for Cargo isn't going away of course, or becoming any less of a focus.

As a part of this, dist has moved towards a standalone CLI tool that doesn't have to be run as a cargo subcommand. You can now run dist init, dist build and more without needing to prefix it with cargo. We still install the Cargo plugin, though, so you're welcome to keep using cargo dist like always. As a part of being able to run without the Cargo plugin, there's one more big change:

dist runs without Cargo

dist no longer requires Cargo if you're not building Rust projects! This is a major change which should make it much more ergonomic for users of other languages. We do still require Cargo if your workspace contains at least one Rust project; this includes commands such as dist init and dist plan.

• impl @Gankra, @mistydemeo feat: make cargo optional

Unified checksum file

This change is completely unrelated to the new name, but it's a very nice one. We've always shipped individual checksum files for each artifact, but in this release we now also ship a unified checksum file which contains all of your hashes in a single place. It's named $HASH_STYLE.sum, for example sha256.sum, and is designed to be compatible with tools such as shasum and sha256sum.

• impl @fasterthanlime Introduce unified manifest file

Fixes

• impl @mistydemeo fix: print Windows paths correctly
• impl @pnehrer Specify path to Cargo.toml when generating wix for package