Grant Application - Package Manager

[yorgos]

@christroutner

Let me paraphrase the conversation that inspired this grant proposal:

“If Radicle can store and serve code, it shouldn’t be that hard to store and serve packages.”

That’s what makes this research a natural next step for Radicle. The scope of the research isn’t to evaluate how Radicle could compete with package managers, but instead, it’s to evaluate how Radicle could integrate with existing package managers.

Thanks for clarifying this !

@christroutner

This is why Verdaccio makes a good use-case: By integrating Radicle with it, users can simply opt-in to using a decentralized package repository (Radicle) without changing their workflow. Throughout the course of this research, I will be looking for similar opportunities to integrate with package managers for other languages.

The example you give of organizations self-hosting their own package repositories is a good one. If that org has made the decision to integrate Radicle, it would be wonderful if that integration could cover both code and packages. And it would be even better if there was an easy way to integrate Radicle (on the back end) with their “org-hosted instance of an existing solution”.

How this integration would look like does sound like an interesting area to explore further, yes!

You will find already quite a lot of discussion that I think is related to this, in this forum topic: Software Releases on Radicle - #27 by kim

We have spent quite some time there, discussing what “Releases” on Radicle would look like. I think that’s relevant because “Releases” are the entities that typically carry information about packages stored in package repositories. I think it is also particularly important to take into account the discussion around “what constitutes a canonical release in a decentralized setting”.

Having said that, there are 2 areas we explicitly excluded from that discussion:

• “how do we produce these binaries” and
• “where/how do we actually host these binaries”

Considering this research is about integration with the package repositories, it sounds to me like those would be worthwhile areas to explore.

I hope that sounds in line with what you also had in mind and you find this helpful rather than confusing things further… But please do let me know if you’d like any further clarifications on the above or if you’re thinking about taking this in some different direction! I would love to hear more on this!