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.error { color:#AA0000; }</style></head><body><p>Hi,</p>
<p>Our code is almost always developed and pushed in small incremental changes. When we implement critical amount of changes in our code, we push new version. </p>
<p>When adding dependencies to Package.swift file, we supply their repository url and version we want to use. However, differentiating code only by it’s version is not enough in some cases. When writing new code features, we use branches. They enable all the mechanisms one needs to create, test and deploy new features without polluting production environment.</p>
<p>I think that Swift Package Manager should have support for branches (and commits). There are several reasons why this feature would greatly improve developer workflow:</p>
<ol>
<li>Writing new features. Being able to specify branch in Package.swift would make creating and testing new features easier. You wouldn’t need to push new version to be able to use it in your Swift program. You would just specify the branch you’re working on.</li>
<li>Differentiating between new Swift versions. This problem comes from the current Swift 2.2 -> Swift 3.0 migration. Many framework developers use specific branches (swift–3, swift3.0) to work on migration of their API’s to Swift 3. However, you can’t use them in your Swift projects because they don’t live in the master branch in the repository. I’m sure this will also happen when Swift 3 starts migration to the Swift 4, until ABI becomes stable.</li>
</ol>
<p>SPM should also have support for specifying commits. Specifying which commit you want to use in your project dependency is not always a good idea, but it’s necessary in some cases.</p>
<p>This shouldn’t be very hard to implement. We would need to update PackageDescription and Get source from swift-package-manager repository to enable specifying branches or commits. Pulling the branch source would just be another parameter in git instruction.</p>
<p>Example:</p>
<pre><code>// Specifying branch
let package = Package(
name: "SomePackage",
dependencies: [
.Package(url: "<a href="https://repo-source.git">https://repo-source.git</a>", branch: "new-feature")
]
)
</code></pre>
<pre><code>// Specifying commits
let package = Package(
name: "SomePackage",
dependencies: [
.Package(url: "<a href="https://repo-source.git">https://repo-source.git</a>", commit: "c336664020v4f94ed78cbe7447a39ae5ca0b6c11")
]
)
</code></pre>
<p>What are your thoughts on this subject?</p></body></html>