[swift-evolution] Searchable Swift Package Manager index?

[Matias Piipari]

I really like the idea of the Swift Package Manager remaining focused, distributed and using Git as part of package management flow. This also makes it very straightforward to use it as part of a deployment workflow for proprietary stuff, amongst many other things.

The approach I was thinking actually as a starting point would be to search github and bitbucket repos for repos which contain feasibly SPM buildable packages and just periodically index the basic metadata from those + measures of popularity and recent activity. This is really to scratch my own itch to find and study open source Swift code (which is amazing to see starting to appear in a Linux compilable form already days from the announcement).

Matias

> On 9 Dec 2015, at 18:34, Gwendal Roué <gwendal.roue at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On that topic, Max Howell wrote (at https://bugs.swift.org/browse/SR-107):
> 
>>> Where to put/find the Package definition for a public dependency like SQLite?
>>> […]
>>> Max Howell has worked on Homebrew, and Homebrew is centralized and hosted on Github (if I'm not mistaken). Do you know what prevented him from importing his particular experience on this topic to the Swift Package Manager? Does he think there are caveats in the current way Homebrew is centralized?
>> 
>> Homebrew made me regret the centralized model. Though having said that I think it would have benefits here since there is really only one correct module map.
>> 
>> Not specializing the behavior for these packages is better for the ecosystem, it remains flexible and consistent.
>> 
>> It would be easy for someone to step up and make an organization that becomes the go-to place for system module packages. I hope the community will answer that call.
>> 
>> If we insisted on a single index then the benefits of decentralization would not be accessible, but if we encourage the community to provide an index while still not treating these package types differently the community has the best of both worlds.
> 
> So it looks like we need someone with strong social skills.
> 
> Gwendal Roué
>