it is often motivating to be able to override the location of a binaryTarget artifact bundle and set it to an location on the local machine to aid development.
currently, SwiftPM enforces a bizarre requirement that the path must be relative to the location of the manifest. this makes it difficult to configure the expected location of the artifact bundle using an environment variable. instead, it becomes necessary to prefix the path with some arbitrary large number of .. operations, such as String.init(repeating: "../", count: 100).
file:// URLs are not a viable workaround, they expect a checksum, which would obviously change when the local binaries are rebuilt, and therefore cannot be hardcoded into the manifest the way they could for release bundles.
can we not simply remove this path restriction? i can see no legitimate purpose it serves, other than to encourage workarounds such as ../../../../../../../../../../.