Package Feeds

[xwu (Xiaodi Wu)]

@yim_lee

That's right. The focus of this proposal is the SwiftPM CLI so we didn't include details on the feed format. One can assume the format will be defined and published at some point in time.

Both the CLI format and the feed format work together to form the user-facing experience for this feature, particularly as you state that the goal is to let anyone publish a feed, implying that making both publishing and consuming these feeds ergonomic are big parts of what you’re reaching for here.

Therefore, I would expect both the CLI and JSON formats to be reviewed in one piece. Put another way, it would be impossible to deliver any form of this feature if either half were rejected; they do not stand alone.

@tomerd

Since this question came up several times, we could probably have done a better job articulating the difference between Package Index, Package Feeds and Package Registry. We believe these are three different components with different purposes.

@tomerd, this is a great explanation; I think it would be very helpful to incorporate this as part of the proposal text and plan of record.

@Mordil

What's the rationale for putting several of the commands under the package category, when they interact with data that is not specific to a given Swift package, as far as I can tell from the pitch?

All of the swift package subcommands today have to do with the current Swift package in the directory that swift package is invoked from:

I’d like to echo this concern regarding the proposed CLI interface. Moreover, I would add that I think the deep nesting mars usability (“swift package feed search module” seems an arbitrary ordering of words), and it confuses not only operations on this package versus operations on packages, but also operations on this feed versus operations on feeds.

I think it would be helpful to explore how much of the nesting can be simplified away, and how consistently we can apply the use of singular versus plural words to clarify this distinction:

swift package list-feeds
swift list-package-feeds
swift package-lists # maybe just call them lists?

swift package-lists add
swift package-lists remove
swift package-lists search
swift package-lists -info

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Edit: Do other package managers (NPM, Cargo, etc.) have similar features? What’s their CLI design for this? Can we align the syntax so that this becomes a transferrable skill that users can learn once and apply more widely? (And, what’s their JSON format? Can we be interoperable with other language-agnostic package managers’ lists?)