Swift Package Index: Auto-generating, Auto-hosting, and Auto-updating DocC Documentation

for completeness, swiftinit.org also hosts package references which overlap with the ones served by swiftpackageindex.com, swift.org, and apple.com. many projects like SwiftNIO and Vapor also host their own package-specific references.

although basic historical archiving is straightforward to acheive, true documentation versioning is extremely difficult to implement when you add URL stability as a requirement.

moreover, certain packages like swift-syntax contain both a large number of symbols, and a large number of tag releases, which makes indexing and serving this kind of content a significant engineering task in and of itself. although most packages do not vend enough API or release often enough to strain the documentation service provider, a handful of “fat” packages like swift-syntax are currently blocking this feature, at least for swiftinit.org.

i believe this was previously discussed at the last meeting of the documentation working group.