I'm reorganising my Rust project into modules, and I have a question about how module paths work. When I structure my project so that each module is located in a different directory, I usually add a mod.rs file in that directory to declare the modules it contains.

However, when I create several modules and need to use one of them from another location, I end up having to write use statements with long or complex paths, often starting with crate::. This makes me wonder why this is necessary and whether there is a cleaner or more idiomatic way to handle it.

Here is an example of my project structure:

src/
├── main.rs
├── models/
│   ├── mod.rs
│   ├── model_task.rs
└── util/
    ├── mod.rs
    └── enum_task.rs

use crate::util::enum_task::StatusTaks;
use chrono::{DateTime, Utc};
use serde::{Deserialize, Serialize};

#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize, Debug)]
pub struct Todo {
    pub id: usize,
    pub description: String,
    pub status: StatusTaks,
    pub create_at: DateTime<Utc>,
    pub update_at: DateTime<Utc>,
}

use serde::{Deserialize, Serialize};

#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize, Debug, PartialEq, Eq)]
pub enum StatusTaks {
    Todo,
    InProgress,
    Done,
}

My question is: why do I need to use crate:: to access modules from other parts of my project? Is this the idiomatic way in Rust, or are there better practices to avoid long and repetitive paths?

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