> On 23. Oct 2017, at 19:41, Jean-Christophe Pastant via swift-evolution
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Is there any news about features that are willling to be integrated into SPM
> 5?
> Those I see the most relevant:
> - iOS support
> - Some kind of configuration/settings support (debug, release, ...)
>
> I'd like to hear about it from maintainers, especially if there's a priority
> order we should follow.
>
> Regards,
>
>
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Yup. My opinions here:
https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mon-20170918/039885.html
<https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mon-20170918/039885.html>.
Basically, I think we need support for 1) resources (or ‘assets’) and 2)
cross-platform modules.
I think that a better package-manager would really accelerate the Swift
ecosystem. We’ve had lots of people complaining about the lack of quality
libraries (e.g. for maths and stats) during the Swift 3/4 phases. Personally, I
still think it’s too much effort to integrate 3rd-party library projects in to
my existing projects and to contribute to them, which is why I usually don’t.
As for Xcode integration: Obviously only Apple can comment on the Xcode roadmap
- but I will point out that, like the rest of Swift and LLVM, the package
manager is open-source and designed with a library architecture. That means
that any IDE could integrate support for SwiftPM, not just Xcode. As users, we
can say what we’d like Apple to do with Xcode, but it’s all academic - since
SwiftPM doesn’t support bundled assets, it can’t support graphical
applications. Bundled assets aren’t just an issue for GUI applications, though
- localisation tables, prepared databases and test resources are useful for any
kind of package.
So, for me the issue with assets is that some platforms have unique compiled
formats (e.g. Apple’s asset catalogues) which support asset variants for
localisations and display resolution. Obviously I want my output App to support
all of these features. In fact, most modern platforms have support for some
kind of asset variants — Apple calls it a TraitCollection, Android calls it a
Context — so do we want to support this concept natively somehow in SwiftPM?
I mean, let’s say I have this awesome cross-platform Swift application/library,
and I’ve listed some files in my Package.swift and I can find them again at
runtime on any platform - all cool. Now, I want to localise my package - what
do I do? I’m going to have to create some middleware to translate
platform-specific concepts in to a baseline which I can look-up based on some
mangling I’m going to create for the file names. Localisation is a problem on
servers, too (particularly for error messages), so some idea of asset variants
could be something universal-enough to include in the package manager.
- Karl
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