Issue 555  April 22nd 2022

One thing I’d love to do a better job with for this newsletter is noticing when Swift packages get significant updates so that I can link to more of them. This community invests so much time and effort into open-source Swift libraries, yet we’re often not great at telling the world about our open-source work.

I was inspired to write about this by Jesse Squires’ recent blog post covering the release of Quick 5.0, with significant fixes and enhancements to the BDD Swift testing framework.

Yes, we have RSS feeds on the Swift Package Index, and the major releases feed can be helpful¹, although I do sometimes wonder what qualifies as a “major release”!² 😂 I’d still love to see more people write or blog about open-source package releases and updates, though. Not just to help me out, but so they show the entire community the great work they are doing.

The biggest problem with what I’m suggesting here is that it asks even more of open-source authors and maintainers. A tweet isn’t much work, so most people do that. Great release notes are a step up from a tweet, and blog posts ask even more of people who are already giving so much.

Open-source funding is often in the news recently, and it’s a massive problem for our industry. In his post, Jesse talks about taking over the project to unblock his team, but it’s clear that he already sees where that responsibility will take him. Into being an unpaid maintainer with obligations to keep this library organised and working, as many before him have been.

I’m also familiar with this through trying to make the Swift Package Index work financially. Sven and I are incredibly grateful to the 56 generous community sponsors who sponsor our project. Still, the reality is that that only covers a fraction of the time we put into it. I’m also thrilled to say that we welcomed our first corporate sponsor, Stream last week. Stream is this newsletter issue’s sponsor, too! So they get a double thanks! ❤️ Please check them out below. The irony is that the Swift Package Index would undoubtedly be considered “well funded” in open-source terms, and yet it’s still unsustainable, and we’re constantly working towards fixing that. I don’t say this to ask you to consider sponsoring the package index, but maybe consider supporting some open-source project that you or your app relies on. Or, even better, ask your company to fund some projects.

¹ You might not believe this, but trying to keep up with some of the libraries was part of the reason behind the idea of building the Swift Package Index. It was far from the only reason, but I did think that if there was a site that tracked packages, maybe I could stay more informed.

² I don’t mean any disrespect to the folks at Mapbox. I know plenty of work goes on over here. My point is that while semantic versioning is a great idea, We will never realise the dream of it being consistently applied. 😅

Dave Verwer