[swift-evolution] Large Proposal: Non-Standard Libraries

[Kelvin Ma]

On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 3:15 PM, Félix Fischer <felix91gr at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 5:24 PM Wallacy <wallacyf at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The Compatibility Suite is a good start, but I agree that something a
>> bit more centralized has its benefits.
>>
>> To be perfect, Compatibility Suite and Swift Package Manager need to work
>> "together" to offer something simple like nodejs npm and a friendly (and
>> central) interface to not only find these projects. Something more similar
>> to nuget too.
>>
>> The only thing I miss using npm and nuget is some kind of "compromise"
>> with maintenance. And also some commitment to (avoid) rework. Several
>> projects remake something that another does also without explaining well
>> the differences between them.
>>
>> Maybe we don't need to code any "Non-Standard Libraries"! Only a opt-in
>> project like Compatibility Suite with steroids. Not only to track those
>> projects, but in some level help defining some standards, documentations,
>> versioning etc. This can be done entirely within the community.
>>
>> Not so similar, however the gstreamer keeps a list of "base", "good",
>> "ugly" and "bad" plugins for similar reasons.
>>
>> We can do something in this line of reasoning:
>> - A central repository for projects (like Compatibility Suite)
>> - A tool to find and add each project (like SwiftPM)
>> - Rules for joining (like Compatibility Suite)
>> - A classification for each repository (like gstreamer)
>> - A good way to make each project as small and direct as possible (to
>> take advantage of cross-module inlining / specialization)
>> - A list of discussion (or a forum?) for people that maintain (or have an
>> interest in maintain) projects in this "official" list.
>>
>
> I like this approach much more. Feels more natural. And a forum
> (piggybacking on the eventual Discourse perhaps). I’d only change two
> things and extend one:
>
> - Instead of “central repository”, a “central index”. It makes it more
> transparent, more distributed, and closer to the current reality.
>
> - Here:
>
>
>> I vote for empowering SwiftPM and Compatibility Suite instead a
>> "Non-Standard Libraries".
>>
>>
> I agree with a central index, but as Kelvin says, we shouldn’t be using
> the Compat Suite directly because of GPL issues.
>
> - I’d extend on the “Rules for Joining” point: they should be as clear and
> explicit as possible, to avoid drama like the one episode that happened
> last year on the JS repositories with that string-padding library. That
> thing broke half of the internet for some hours, and it was all about
> something unclear in the rules, if I remember the case correctly.
>

I think Swift is less vulnerable to that than node.js if anything because
Swift is compiled ahead of time so someone removing their repo doesn’t
instantly break everything else.
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