[swift-evolution] [SPM] Roadmap?

[Rick Ballard]

> On Oct 23, 2017, at 10:41 AM, 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.


Hi all,

(CC-ing swift-build-dev, which is the SwiftPM-specific list and is the best way to get the SwiftPM core team's attention)

The SwiftPM core team has been discussing our plans for SwiftPM 5, and expect to publish a roadmap of the features we're most likely to pursue this year. As always, we welcome proposals and contributions for features the community would most like to see.

Regarding the specific features that have been mentioned in this thread:

– iOS support

I think that this will be best provided by native IDE integration. However, in the meantime, I'd welcome contributions to help improve Xcode's project generation support.

– Xcode integration

I think this will be very important for widespread SwiftPM adoption by the Apple-platform developer community.  My previous comments on 2017/6/5 to this list are still the latest word on this:

> Xcode 9 lays the groundwork for first-class, native support in Xcode for Swift packages with the preview version of its new build system. This build system provides the flexibility and extensibility needed to allow Xcode to support new build models, such as Swift packages. Additionally, considerable work has gone into the SwiftPM library vended by the SwiftPM project, which will support integrating Swift packages into tools like Xcode.

I'll note that as Xcode's new build system is still a "preview", further work will be needed there before it replaces the old build system. As Xcode is not part of the open source project, forward-looking schedules aren't something I can discuss.

– Build settings and configuration support

The SwiftPM core team has done some work on a proposal for this, and we're looking forward to getting this into a publishable state and discussing it with the community.

– Submodules

Can you elaborate on exactly what you'd like to see here? Offhand I don't recall seeing any feature requests in this area.

– Better support for including and linking C libraries

I'd also like to see this, and welcome proposals / contributions.

– A swift test command that can execute arbitrary testing code

As I recall, where the core team had left off on this was a discussion of what testability model were going to propose for SwiftPM (specifically, handling Swift's -enable-testing flag when needed, but minimizing unnecessary rebuilds from using that flag vs. having it off for release builds). IIRC, we were considering explicitly modeling "white box" (which needs -enable-testing) vs "black box" tests. It's been a little while since we last discussed this topic, so if anyone wants this urgently, feel free to start a public conversation about this. Any discussion of this should also involve the XCTest developers (via swift-corelibs-dev).

– Help us manage symbol versioning and availability

Can you elaborate on what you'd like to see here?

– Resources / assets

I think this will be especially important for the iOS developer story, but of course it's useful elsewhere as well. This is definitely on the core team's todo list to write a proposal for at some point.

– Cross-platform modules

Can you elaborate on what you'd like to see here?

– A better C/C++ integration story

The most immediate thing I'm aware of that we're likely to need to do here is to provide some build settings to support C++-specific needs. That said, I'd welcome discussion of other immediate needs here as well.

– Better error reporting (SPM’s error messages are often cryptic)

This is something we made substantial improvements to in SwiftPM 4, so if you haven't upgraded to that release, I'd strongly encourage you to. For other cryptic error messages you encounter, please file reports at bugs.swift.org <http://bugs.swift.org/> – I'd like to see these clarified.

Thanks, all.

	- Rick

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