[discussion] Re-design Mintfile

[hiragram]

Hello.

I propose a new design of Mintfile, and want to hear opinions from other developers.

Overview

Currently supported Mintfile looks like:

yonaskolb/mint
yonaskolb/mint@1.0.0
https://github.com/yonaskolb/mint
git@github.com:yonaskolb/Mint.git

And new Mintfile that I propose looks like:

github yonaskolb/mint
github yonaskolb/mint version:1.0.0
git https://github.com/yonaskolb/mint
git git@github.com:yonaskolb/Mint.git

Pros/Cons

Pros

• Parser and other implementations can get more easier.
  • It is more easier to implement features like:

    local_package /path/to/swift/package   // <- use package on local disk
    local_git /path/to/git/repository      // <- use repo on local disk
    github yonaskolb/mint commit:abcdefg   // <- specify revision by commit hash
    github yonaskolb/mint branch:abcdefg   // <- specify revision by branch name

Cons

• Mintfile syntax gets a little complicated.
• It is extremely breaking change.
  • But It may be welcomed because Mint has not reached to version 1 yet.

Conclusion

I don't believe that my idea is the best way. If you have better one, please tell me and let's discuss.

Refs

background: https://github.com/yonaskolb/Mint/pull/150#issuecomment-600802465

[yonaskolb]

Would be good to see a proposal for how this carries over into the command line arguments as well

[hiragram]

@yonaskolb Do you mean something like $ mint install xcodegen version:1.0.0 ?

[vknabel]

I generally agree that it will be much easier to maintain the new Mintfile approach. I just wanted to throw in some ideas.

Ruby

The current approach by @hiragram looks like Ruby actual Ruby-Code. Which makes sense as both, CocoaPods and Carthage, rely on Ruby for their syntax.

Pros: No parsing, consistent Cons: whole new ecosystem (ruby dependency, bundler, ...) to depend on

Swift

As alternative approach to using Ruby, we could use actual Swift code: e.g. Mintfile.swift.

Pros: Uses the main language for the task Cons: More complex to execute, flickery without IDE support

Edit: we could also use PackageConfig#custom-configuration-types for this task. Though its docs are a bit confusing.

PackageConfig

We could use PackageConfig to store our CLI-dependencies into a Package.swift file.

#if canImport(PackageConfig)
    import PackageConfig

    let config = PackageConfiguration([
        "mint": [
            // the actual format might differ
            "target": [
                "github": "yonaskolb/mint",
                "version": "1.0.0"
            ]
        ],
    ]).write()
#endif

Pros: No parsing, can be combined with other approaches (Dictionaries are JSON encodable), consistent with Rocket and Komondor Cons: External dependency, wouldn't make sense with custom-parsing Mintfile-format

YAML

We could just use YAML as format for the Mintfile:

target:
  git: https://github.com/yonaskolb/mint
  version: 1.0.0

Pros: works great with PackageConfig (using YAMLDecoder and some JSONDecoder) Cons: yikes, three dependencies?

[hiragram]

Hi @vknabel , thank you. Yes, my concept is strongly inspired by Carthage. YAML seems nice, and @yonaskolb has much experience Swift+YAML in XcodeGen project.

Now I think that adding support for YAML-style definition is better than modifying structure of existing Mintfile. If @yonaskolb thinks it's good, I start implementing YAML support.

[AF-cgi]

Hi @yonaskolb, do you plan any solution to update the Mintfile automatically including versioning? From my point Podfile and Package has good approaches to do this. Also other dependency managers has this option.

[toshi0383]

I'm big thumb-up for the YAML support. 🙆‍♂️ Maybe better to have a new issue for YAML support, as we don't intend to "re-design Mintfile" any more, right?

[hiragram]

Actually, YAML support implementation is almost completed. I'm going to send a PR in several days.

[Tulleb]

Why is this ticket still open? It's been more than 2 years now and latest message was talking about an ongoing PR?

[hakkurishian]

one year later, would really love to be able to depend on branches ! Anything that can be done to help this move forward?

[yonaskolb]

I'd be happy with a YAML Mintfile. @hiragram do you have WIP you'd like to share?

would really love to be able to depend on branches !

@hakkurishian you can currently depend on branches using the same syntax org/package@my_branch.