Hello, Swift community.
The review of SE-0500 ran from November 20th to December 4th, 2025.
The community's feedback in the review thread was overall positive. The review brought up two questions about the proposal. First, the interaction of templates and version resolution, which was addressed during the review period by the author by following the existing Semantic Versioning resolution behavior. The second feedback was around the initialPackageType parameter of a template target.
The initialPackageType is intended to reduce the boilerplate required to write templates; however, it was brought up that the file and folder layout of an initialPackageType would need to be stable. Otherwise, any layout change to an initialPackageType could potentially break existing templates. The @build-and-packaging-workgroup and @ecosystem-steering-group discussed this and evaluated alternative approaches such as versioning the layout of an initialPackageType with the tools version of the manifest. While this would mitigate breaking templates, it still would create a less than ideal developer experience for template authors when a simple tools-version bump suddenly breaks their template. As a result, we decided to remove the initialPackageType parameter.
Accordingly, SE-0500 is accepted with modifications: specifically, to remove the initialPackageType parameter from the template target.
As always, I'd like to thank the community for its thoughtful contributions during the pitch and review of this proposal. The community's involvement helps to make Swift a better language.
Franz
Review Manager