Experimentally, I’ve come to the conclusion that a dependency that is a Cargo workspace does not read the Cargo.toml workspace file. Instead, when a [dependencies] line is added that points to a Git repository, for example, which is a workspace, the repository is searched for the Cargo.toml file(s) of the workspace member. To quote the documentation specifying-dependencies:

“Cargo will fetch the git repository at this location then look for a Cargo.toml for the requested crate anywhere inside the git repository (not necessarily at the root - for example, specifying a member crate name of a workspace and setting git to the repository containing the workspace)”

You might wonder why this matters. Well, for example, the other day I was trying to use a dependency at a specific commit for a project that was a Cargo workspace and the build would break. After a frustrating amount of time, I realized the issue was that the workspace specified a [patch]; however, since the workspace Cargo.toml file is seemingly ignored, the [patch] line must also be added to my project’s Cargo.toml file.

Here’s an example project structure:

External Git repo (repo_one)

[workspace]
members = [A, B, C]

[patch.crates-io.C]
path = "C"

My Git repo (repo_two):

[dependencies]
A = { git="https://repo_one", rev="70cf45" }

[patch.crates-io.C]
git="https://repo_one"
rev="70cf45"

repo_one is the workspace that my project repo_two depends on. Initially, I tried only specifying the dependencies line without the [patch]. Even though I don’t care to use anything from members B or C, when A is included, it compiles and then looks for dependencies in C since A has a Cargo.toml file that points to C. If A depends on C and since C is on crates-io, without the [patch] Cargo tries to fetch C from Crates.io instead of the repository at the specified Git commit. Therefore, to fix the build so that both A and C use the same commit, a [patch] line can be added to repo_two (my project) so that it will be sure to fetch C from the specified Git commit as well.

More about using patch can be found here.