Package index service

[Sze]

I think @markus is talking about establishing the convention of using one specific tag on external sites like github, gitlab and codeberg, so that zig packages can be found there via that tag.

I think it could be useful, but it probably would only be used by some people, but maybe we can reach a high percentage if we promote the visibility of that tag, or maybe it could even snowball if enough people use it.

I don’t really think I like the idea of some package index service, because I think there would quickly be 3 alternative half baked competing implementations and also it would not do that much, except crawl a bunch of hosting services for existing packages. Zig specifically tries to avoid centralized package management, so you would always have to deal with getting packages from multiple sites and discovering those sites.

I think one alternative could be to just create more Awesome Lists:

Zig Projects Lists / Awesome Lists / External Resource Collections

This post is a wiki post, the idea is to collect links to collections of Zig projects, for example Awesome Lists or other similar collections, to make it easier to find projects that haven’t explicitly created a showcase topic in this forum. If the collection is about learning add it to https://ziggit.dev/t/zig-learning-resources/3160 instead. https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community-Projects https://github.com/catdevnull/awesome-zig https://github.com/zigcc/awesome-zig https://github.co…

One thing that may make sense is to talk to creators / curators of popular awesome lists whether there could be some way that we can write a script that basically merges and deduplicates all those lists. But I guess that would only work if those lists are similar enough and I don’t really want to create anything that pushes additional work on anybody.

So for that merging thing the question would be whether the curators are interested in merging their list with other lists, if they aren’t interested, people could still write a script themselves that does that locally, sort of building an index of awesome lists.

Theoretically such a script also could use some apis to do searches based on some tag. All of that sounds like a community coordination effort, that needs to be carried by at least a few people who actually can invest some time in that. Creating some thing once and then letting it bit-rot doesn’t really help anybody. So I think it would take some people who actually want to commit some steady time to do that.

Personally I think I would be most interested in some simple tool that just helps you in building a localized index, collected from an extendable number of sources, basically a tool with plugins to search github, gitlab, sourcehut, codeberg, etc…