I guess that explains why Dave Verwer handed off ownership of the iOS Dev Weekly newsletter.<p>Always great to see community members see success.
Well I was thinking about making a competitor to SPI because they only support GitHub repo’s.<p>This news makes it easy. I’m starting the engines on this…
Working on an idea after it has been Sherlocked is a bold choice.
Or send in a PR for gitlab/… support?
Please get in touch, as I've wanted this to support Gitlab (et al) for a while, and I'm nervous about the future of SPI now.
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Back when I was following Swift, I was a bit confused by there being 2 distinct sites that seemed to be pretty much the same thing:<p>- <a href="https://swiftpackageregistry.com" rel="nofollow">https://swiftpackageregistry.com</a><p>- <a href="https://swiftpackageindex.com" rel="nofollow">https://swiftpackageindex.com</a>
Not optimistic here. While I'm glad the SPI guys are getting paid (that is, a full time job), Apple is pretty bad at open source and developer services both, and they explicitly call out developer identity as a future direction, which doesn't fill me with hope.
I tried to get a personal developer account (I'm already a developer through an organisation). The app required a Driver's license as the only accepted ID. I don't drive because I'm blind. They did a screen share and talked me through applying on the web site. It failed. They never gave a reason and ignored me when I asked for one. They just said<p>"Hello Robert,
Thank you for your patience while I awaited a response from our operations team.<p>Upon review, we have found that we can’t verify your identity with the Apple Developer app or provide further assistance with the Apple Account for Apple developer programs.<p>You can still take advantage of great content using your Apple Account in Xcode to develop and test apps on your own device. Learn more about Xcode development.<p>I do apologise that I was not of more help to you in this situation but wish you the best of luck for the future.
"<p>They will destroy the developer experience when they add identity and signing.
I'm not sure about the laws where you're at, but to me, this sounds like something they should have to accommodate you on.
My driver's license is in a form factor Apple cannot scan. A few months ago, I tried to get it scanned four times (with the UI telling me various versions of "your ID is too blurry" / "there was a technical issue") before Apple just blocked me from applying for the developer program.<p>Their support gave me the exact same template: "After reviewing your account details, it looks like we can’t verify your identity with the Apple Developer app or provide further assistance with the Apple Account for Apple developer programs."<p>I was only unblocked recently (surprisingly -- I thought I was banned forever), and so I decided to try applying with passport instead. That got further, as instead of saying my ID image was blurry, it said "ID Verification Rejected".<p>I am in contact with developer support right now and they told me that one of my devices or phone numbers was registered with another developer account, but they haven't told me which one (only to "remove phone numbers and devices that you don’t own" -- which isn't applicable as I own all of them).<p>They're taking 4+ days to reply each time though, which is super frustrating.
I see the opposite, they have a lot of oss projects nowadays and most of their new, interesting stuff is getting open sourced too, a la Microsoft
Simply being open doesn't make them good open source projects. Luckily the SPI shouldn't need to conform to Apple's release schedule, and should operate mostly independently, so the worst aspects of Apple's open source projects will be less of an issue.
No true Scotsman…
Even simpler, this is a "no Scotsman" scenario. Apple has unprecedented contempt for Open designs and software standards, even compared to the pitiful example that Microsoft and Google set.<p>Unlike them, Apple takes a stance of contravening the public good to emphasize lock-in. They refused USB-C for as long as possible to sell licensed serial connectors that their Macs didn't even use. They fought tooth-and-nail to politicize the free distribution of software when the EU wanted to enable sideloading. They abandoned open initiatives like Khronos, for no reason other than to screw over cross-platform developers. They give Safari special OS entitlements that they refuse to extend to competing mobile browsers, and then justify it as if they can't write a safe OS.<p>There is no company on planet Earth that goes this far to undermine FOSS. Apple is <i>the</i> fakest Scot.
Not only is Apple bad at open source, they ban participating on open source projects outside of work.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200421143520/https://twitter.com/mdiep/status/1252586799098183682" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20200421143520/https://twitter.c...</a>
This acquisition sounds like a sign that Apple wants to get better on that front.
Glad to see it.<p>I like the SPM, but it definitely has its "rough edges."<p>Having an index like this, is great.<p>However, I guarantee that there will be some caterwaulin', if Apple decides to regulate which packages get indexed (which I think should happen, as it's now an official Apple brand).
> … if Apple decides to regulate which packages get indexed<p>I have mixed feelings here. If they disallow too much, they’ll alienate too many projects and there will be an exodus of non-Apple platform Swift devs.<p>I guess it doesn’t really gate pulling any dependencies you want, but too much and/or the wrong kind of filtering (e.g. removing non-Apple alternatives to core Apple libraries) would not look (nor feel) good.
Agreed. They do have a nasty habit of dinging competitors to Apple apps, in the App Store.<p>It would not be a good thing, if they did that, here.<p>It would be interesting to see what they do with some of my packages.<p>I release alternative UI views, and Apple is infamous for wanting to force all developers into conforming to their UX.<p>It would make me sad, if they blocked things like these:<p><a href="https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner</a><p><a href="https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Checkbox" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Checkbox</a><p><a href="https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_RetroLEDDisplay" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_RetroLEDDisplay</a>
Back when I was working with Swift, I always thought Swift Package Index was made by Apple
Apple has something with Swift similar to what Google has with Go. The language has a lot of desirable features for server development very much like Go and Rust. Especially when compared to Java and C#.<p>It makes sense for them to build their services using Swift instead of something like Go and the Swift-on-server team has been doing a lot of work to get swift in a usable state on Linux. Having a thriving opensource (starting with a package index) makes a lot of sense to them for that.<p>My only problem with Swift is personal taste and experience. I tried it on linux few times (admittingly few years ago now) and generally I wasn't a fan. Go and Rust solve all the problems that Swift could have solved for me, so I didn't bother. But just like node got an entire class of developers into server side programming, Swift could be apples approach to get their iOS and MacOS developers a way to easily write server side code in swift as well
kind of surprised Swift didn't launch with this by default, built in-house
I'm always surprised as well when new languages targeting widespread use launch without an official one. Dotnet/C#, Go and other languages that come batteries included with the package manager built into some kind of compiler/SDK binary, make the out of the box experience so much smoother, and the community hasn't fragmented nearly as much as say Java, Python and JS have into competing third party package management and project build tools.<p>Everyone in the Go community more or less uses the same Go modules support built into the SDK binary, much like how almost the entire DotNet community uses the NuGet package manager support built into the dotnet SDK binary. There are no extra dependencies to grab your project dependencies and build it.<p>My experiences in those langauges is that there is so much less debate over tooling, and people just get work done. No one in DotNet is waging an equivelent holy war about Gradle vs Maven etc...<p>I'm all for choices, but the languages who have made package management a first class citizen in their SDKs tend to be the languages I've enjoyed working in the most. I think package management tooling is a critical piece of developer ergonomics.<p>People used to joke a lot about how JS has a new framework every week, but I feel that way about Python build tooling! I've now had to use uv, poetry, pipenv, hatch...
I find your choice of examples (dotnet and go) baffling to me. Both enjoyed a very long life (8-10 years) past “1.0” before getting a standard package manager. The other examples, Java, python and JS are significantly older than Go (and even dotnet). Python and JS also had a significantly different intended use (scripting) than where they ended. Expectations of a language and its ecosystem changed. The compiler, linker, build system, package manager, LSP, linter, formatter, debugger, and plenty more are expected of any new language now.
And there I was hoping the Swift ecosystem could emancipate itself from Apple instead of getting eaten up.