[swift-users] SwiftPM manual dependency management

[Geordie J]

Hi all,

My team and I are trying to use SwiftPM to develop a relatively complex app with multiple dependencies, all of which are being developed locally and in parallel. The reason for this is compatibility with an existing module/import structure used by our iOS app. Maybe I’m doing something very wrong but my experience so far (2 months in) is that this is extremely difficult with SwiftPM.

What I’d love to be able to do is to just run `git add submodule http://blah.com/mysubmodule.git` <http://blah.com/mysubmodule.git%60> in the Packages subdirectory and SwiftPM would just let me manage dependencies from there myself.

I was excited to see that SwiftPM 4 has a "Top of Tree" development option for this purpose. So far my experience with this has not been good. Firstly because SwiftPM still unnecessarily tries to clone my repos itself (some of which are huge), and secondly because this creates an absolute path dependency in `.build/dependencies-state.json`, meaning this setup isn’t sharable within our dev team.

Attempting this with "local" git urls adds an almost absurd level of complexity, having to tag each commit for SwiftPM to build. The fact that we'd need to make a commit to test whether the project even builds is insane enough as is, let alone the tagging and trying to tell the base project to use a newer minor version etc etc.

Adding multiple subtargets is also not an option because the dependencies (as dynamic libraries) really are shared between multiple targets/sub-dependencies, which SwiftPM seems to deal with quite well.

tldr; *Please* let us manage dependencies ourselves. It’d be so easy if Package.swift had an option along the lines of .Package.local(named: "XYZ") that it then looked for in ./Packages/XYZ. Again, maybe I’m overlooking something but this seems like an obvious and vital option to have. It’d also simplify the introductory SwiftPM docs significantly.

Is anyone else having this issue? Would this change really be as simple and painless as it sounds? I would be prepared to make a pull request along these lines.

Best Regards,
Geordie


PS. In SwiftPM 3 we had been using a hack that worked great: by filling in the dependencies' "basedOn" key in `workspace-state.json`, SwiftPM just left us alone.. We were able to commit `workspace-state.json` into our base project’s git repo and the rest Just Worked™. Now with the absolute paths being checked for this doesn’t seem to be an option.
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