the command shows the entire depth history of the packages and dependencies - are you asserting it should only show "the first layer" (The details that are otherwise just in the manifest or pins file) if the dependencies havent been fully resolved?

Comment by Toni Suter (JIRA)

Maybe I am missing something. But when I create a project with the following Package.swift file:

// swift-tools-version:3.1

import PackageDescription

let package = Package(
  name: "MyProject",
  dependencies: [
    .Package(url: "https://github.com/IBM-Swift/Kitura.git", majorVersion: 1, minor: 6)
  ]
)

And when I now run the command swift package describe, the Swift Package Manager first fetches the dependencies and then prints the following output:

Name: MyProject
Path: /Users/tonisuter/Desktop/MyProject
Modules: 
    Name: MyProject
    C99name: MyProject
    Test module: false
    Type: executable
    Module type: SwiftModule
    Path: /Users/tonisuter/Desktop/MyProject/Sources
    Sources: main.swift

This output contains nothing about the dependencies, right?

Hey tonisuter (JIRA User), sorry - my mistake. I was thinking of swift package show-dependencies, which outputs:

.
└── Kitura<https://github.com/IBM-Swift/Kitura.git@1.6.3>
    ├── Kitura-net<https://github.com/IBM-Swift/Kitura-net.git@1.6.2>
    │   ├── LoggerAPI<https://github.com/IBM-Swift/LoggerAPI.git@1.6.0>
    │   ├── Socket<https://github.com/IBM-Swift/BlueSocket.git@0.12.45>
    │   ├── CCurl<https://github.com/IBM-Swift/CCurl.git@0.2.3>
    │   └── SSLService<https://github.com/IBM-Swift/BlueSSLService.git@0.12.32>
    │       └── Socket<https://github.com/IBM-Swift/BlueSocket.git@0.12.45>
    ├── SwiftyJSON<https://github.com/IBM-Swift/SwiftyJSON.git@15.0.6>
    └── Kitura-TemplateEngine<https://github.com/IBM-Swift/Kitura-TemplateEngine.git@1.6.0>

I was confusing the two commands in my head when I was scanning open bugs yesterday.

For what it's worth, swift package show-dependencies, swift package describe, and swift package dump-package all utilize the same code pathes, loading up the package manifest with let graph = try loadPackageGraph() which loads the manifests, parses it, loads any pins defined, and does a full dependency resolution pass over the whole kit before returning back - the resulting datastructure handed back is what's passed back to describe to provide the output - or to the variant description mechanisms like show-dependencies.

Is the process causing you problems, or are you reporting this because it's doing potentially needless work for that specific outcome?

We need a separate method to load just the root packages so we avoid unnecessary work.

Comment by Toni Suter (JIRA)

No problem :-) I am currently working on an Eclipse-based Swift IDE (https://www.tifig.net/) which uses the Swift Package Manager as its build system. In order to be able to correctly index a project, the IDE needs to know about all the packages and all the modules in the project. So I thought I could use the Swift Package Manager to obtain that information. Basically, I wanted to first call swift package show-dependencies --format json which would give me the path of each package as well as the dependency graph. Then I would execute the command swift package describe --type json for the main package as well as for all packages that have been downloaded as dependencies. This would then output the name, path and type of each module for each package.

Going back to my previous example, the process would look like this:

1. Execute swift package show-dependencies --format json
   => Downloads all the dependencies, which is good
2. Execute swift package describe --type json for the main package
   => Doesn't download anything, because its dependencies have already been fetched in step 1
3. For each dependency (e.g., Kitura, Kitura-net, etc):

• Execute cd <path-of-dependency>

• Execute swift package describe --type json
  => Downloads the dependency's own dependencies. However, those have already been fetched in step 1, which makes this whole process very slow, because indirect dependencies are downloaded at least 2 times.

I hope my explanation makes sense :-)

tonisuter (JIRA User) In that case, it is better to use libSwiftPM. It is basically package manager as a framework, so it can be integrated into various IDEs.
The APIs are not stable as of now but you won't need to work around limitation of the CLI tools. You also get things like build plan to generate compiler arguments and dependencies.

If you want to have a quick chat sometime, you can join our slack: http://swift-package-manager.herokuapp.com

Comment by Toni Suter (JIRA)

Thanks @aciidb0mb3r

This is done with the new "package resolve" command