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If you’ve listened to the last couple of episodes of the Swift Package Index podcast, Swift Package Indexing, you’ll have heard Sven and I talk about package naming.

It’s something that we both spend more time than most thinking about, given what we do, but at the risk of diving directly into one of the hard problems, I’d love to see more consistency with how the Swift community names packages.

Before SwiftPM, package/library naming was mainly PascalCase, with a few packages carrying over some pseudo namespacing left over from Objective-C. But since SwiftPM, things have started to diverge a bit, with all lowercase package names, and then, my pet peeve, packages that include “swift” in the package name. It just feels so unnecessary for packages built for the Swift package manager. 🫨

I understand that in the big wide world of GitHub repository names, you might want to make the repository name indicate the primary language¹, but package manifests have a name field that’s purely for naming, and yet…

I’d usually call for Apple to take a stand here and set a standard, but they are being quite consistent already. Unfortunately, they’re consistently adding the “swift-“ prefix. 😬

Is there some reason I’m missing as to why these names all start with “swift”? I know this is only a small nitpick in the grand scheme of things, but I’d love it if Swift package naming could head back towards PascalCase being the standard, as it used to be.


¹ Although I’d argue GitHub language filtering is better than including the language as part of the repository name.

Dave Verwer  

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