[swift-evolution] [SPM] Roadmap?

[Karl Wagner]

> On 23. Oct 2017, at 19:41, Jean-Christophe Pastant via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Is there any news about features that are willling to be integrated into SPM 5?
> Those I see the most relevant:
> - iOS support
> - Some kind of configuration/settings support (debug, release, ...)
> 
> I'd like to hear about it from maintainers, especially if there's a priority order we should follow.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> swift-evolution mailing list
> swift-evolution at swift.org
> https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

Yup. My opinions here: https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mon-20170918/039885.html <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mon-20170918/039885.html>. Basically, I think we need support for 1) resources (or ‘assets’) and 2) cross-platform modules.

I think that a better package-manager would really accelerate the Swift ecosystem. We’ve had lots of people complaining about the lack of quality libraries (e.g. for maths and stats) during the Swift 3/4 phases. Personally, I still think it’s too much effort to integrate 3rd-party library projects in to my existing projects and to contribute to them, which is why I usually don’t.

As for Xcode integration: Obviously only Apple can comment on the Xcode roadmap - but I will point out that, like the rest of Swift and LLVM, the package manager is open-source and designed with a library architecture. That means that any IDE could integrate support for SwiftPM, not just Xcode. As users, we can say what we’d like Apple to do with Xcode, but it’s all academic - since SwiftPM doesn’t support bundled assets, it can’t support graphical applications. Bundled assets aren’t just an issue for GUI applications, though - localisation tables, prepared databases and test resources are useful for any kind of package.

So, for me the issue with assets is that some platforms have unique compiled formats (e.g. Apple’s asset catalogues) which support asset variants for localisations and display resolution. Obviously I want my output App to support all of these features. In fact, most modern platforms have support for some kind of asset variants — Apple calls it a TraitCollection, Android calls it a Context — so do we want to support this concept natively somehow in SwiftPM?

I mean, let’s say I have this awesome cross-platform Swift application/library, and I’ve listed some files in my Package.swift and I can find them again at runtime on any platform - all cool. Now, I want to localise my package - what do I do? I’m going to have to create some middleware to translate platform-specific concepts in to a baseline which I can look-up based on some mangling I’m going to create for the file names. Localisation is a problem on servers, too (particularly for error messages), so some idea of asset variants could be something universal-enough to include in the package manager.

- Karl
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/attachments/20171028/5e07fa08/attachment.html>