Hi all,
Something that came up in some discussions I had at *JuliaCon* is that
people perceive packages in METADATA as being for more "serious" packages,
i.e. by being there there is an implication of a certain minimum quality. A
lot of my efforts in the package ecosystem have been try to help package
developers to live up to that expectation. A consequence of this perception
is that some people might be averse to list their work on METADATA, for
fear its not good enough/not ready.
You can currently list a package on METADATA with:
- a version 0.0.0, which was the preferred way originally but is now
discouraged. This tagged version's hash would be updated as needed (i.e. it
doesn't follow master)
- a listing with no tagged version, which allows someone to do
Pkg.add("YourPkg") and automatically get the most up-to-date version of
your package.
Of course, you pretty much need to announce your package somewhere other
than METADATA to let users know it exists, and users can you
Pkg.clone("..") almost as easily as Pkg.add("..") with a no-version
listing. Currently pkg.julialang.org doesn't show packages without a
version, so the no-version listing is of limited utility for
discoverability.
A proposal that came up a few times at the conference was for some sort of
METADATA-EXTRA, which only has versions of packages without version numbers
and is open to everyone and anyone. It'd be super easy to add packages -
simply add a name and URL to a list. Perhaps it could be accessed through a
package not in Base, e.g. PkgExtra.
It would have
PkgExtra.update_listing() - refresh local list of package names and URLs
PkgExtra.add(pkgname..) - git clone a package to ~/.juila/v0.x/
PkgExtra.update(pkgname...) - git pull the packages
PkgExtra.rm(pkgname...) - nuke the packages
So basically, super simple. User could even be responsible for satisfying
any dependencies of the packages installed this way. At the most, the
REQUIRE in the package should be used, to keep this system as light-weight
as possible.
So this wouldn't be much work to get going, but I was more curious to see
if there is actually demand for this. I'm worried its one of those things
people say they want, but I'm not sure if the demand is real. This might be
bad just in that it "forks" METADATA sort of, which is possibly not a great
idea for a new package. On the plus side, it could encourage even more
development and sharing.
Thoughts?
