I chatted with @NeoNacho, @ddunbar, @rballard and @abertelrud this morning in person about this proposal. We think it may be possible to compose the functionality proposed here using the local dependencies feature. However, there are several open questions:
• This proposal allows cloning packages automatically but there is no such functionality in the local dependencies. The local dependency feature can be extended to include a URL or people can write scripts to perform the cloning operations.
• Users will need to create a target and declare dependency on the products they want to build. This may be a good thing because it allows control over what is actually built. We can add a special case: if there are no targets and all dependencies are local, we build all available products. Or, we can add a flag to SwiftPM to build everything.
• It was also mentioned that people may want a global edit mode for the packages they usually work on. This can be done by a global swiftpm config file, similar to gitconfig. Since this config could be highly personal, there is a concern around sharing that within a team.