  Cargo, the software packaging manager of Rust, provides a yank mechanism to
support release-level deprecation, which can prevent packages from depending on
yanked releases. Most prior studies focused on code-level (i.e., deprecated
APIs) and package-level deprecation (i.e., deprecated packages). However, few
studies have focused on release-level deprecation. In this study, we
investigate how often and how the yank mechanism is used, the rationales behind
its usage, and the adoption of yanked releases in the Cargo ecosystem. Our
study shows that 9.6% of the packages in Cargo have at least one yanked
release, and the proportion of yanked releases kept increasing from 2014 to
2020. Package owners yank releases for other reasons than withdrawing a
defective release, such as fixing a release that does not follow semantic
versioning or indicating a package is removed or replaced. In addition, we
found that 46% of the packages directly adopted at least one yanked release and
the yanked releases propagated through the dependency network, which leads to
1.4% of the releases in the ecosystem having unresolved dependencies.
