With near-90% adoption, is it perhaps better for the ecosystem if the next major swift-tools version goes all-in on declarative manifests?
It’s worth noting that the Python community had a long history of using an executable setup.py to vend package dependency information as well as perform actual package installation, but chose to pivot from that approach to a declarative syntax. While pip retains compatibility with executable setup.py files, as is being pitched here, I’ve heard a lot of buzz about the uv package- and virtual-environment manager, which exclusively supports declarative manifests. I’m not plugged into the professional Python development community, which has certainly had its issues with breaking changes, but I’m curious whether that buzz represents serious momentum and/or broad adoption of declarative manifests.
Unlike Python, Swift is still in the very early days of its package management story, and might have a chance to execute a more forceful break.