[swift-build-dev] Advice on using SwiftPM for developing large projects

[Geordie J]

Hello Swift Build Devs!

I filed a bug to track progress of the proposed Multi-Package Repo enhancement to Swift Package Manager and was referred to the mailing list (thanks to Jordan Rose for the tip!)

We have a reasonably complex project consisting of five or so separate modules. For iOS we had been managing this with various git submodules containing Xcode projects. This worked great, but doesn’t gel with SwiftPM: making a commit (until relatively recently a tag as well), pushing to origin, waiting for SPM to download everything that is already on the local machine, seeing that the entire thing doesn’t even compile, and repeating, doesn’t work for our daily active development.

The only viable workaround for this has been to put all of the packages in editable mode. But this has proven to be very frustrating too: I have spent literally weeks fighting against changes made as new SPM versions are released with different quirks that each time break how or whether that workaround works. In that time I’m sure we could have gone a long way to developing and releasing a fix instead.

Multi-package repos certainly sound like the solution we’re looking for. It was proposed over a year ago here: https://github.com/ddunbar/swift-evolution/blob/multi-package-repos/proposals/NNNN-swiftpm-multi-package-repos.md <https://github.com/ddunbar/swift-evolution/blob/multi-package-repos/proposals/NNNN-swiftpm-multi-package-repos.md>. I guess the reason I didn’t consider working on this proposal six months ago was I'd understood that a) the proposal had been accepted in some way, and b) that active work was being done on it already.

I’m not sure if either of those are true today. So as an aside/meta-question, does anybody know of a resource that tracks progress of evolution proposals?

I did find this commit by Ankit Aggarwal: https://github.com/apple/swift-package-manager/commit/1ff987c64c00e9dc60e040f6e960602c84eede5e <https://github.com/apple/swift-package-manager/commit/1ff987c64c00e9dc60e040f6e960602c84eede5e> which seems to tantalisingly point in the right direction, via the isLocal property. I couldn’t see any way of using it though.

So I’m looking for input as to whether we as individuals or as a community can do anything to push progress on this proposal: whether there is another way around it, or what else we could do?

At this point I’d even be overjoyed with a solution that just spits out the clang / swiftc / linker calls made by `swift build` so we could write our own script and avoid re-working-around changes every release or so. We really don’t need any management of dependencies at all, just building.

Cheers and thank you in advance,
Geordie

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