Improve aiken packages / aiken add commands

[KtorZ]

What is your idea? Provide a use case.

Aiken provides commands for adding dependencies to a project (i.e. automatically edit aiken.toml). However, commands are a bit "clunky" at the moment and could be improved in the following ways:

• The --version option on aiken add could be made optional; when not provided, the dependency will be added considering only the default branch on the target repository. This means using the GitHub API for querying the default branch. For example, aiken add aiken-lang/stdlib should add the standard library using main as a version.

• aiken add should verify that a given repository / project exists when adding it. Ideally, it should also check that a commit or branch given as --version also exists. In both cases, display a human-readable error and a hint to troubleshoot the problem. For well-known organizations like aiken-lang, we could even make suggestion using a levenshtein distance as it is quite common to go for aiken/stdlib instead of aiken-lang/stdlib.

• Add a aiken remove command to easily remove a dependency.

• Add aiken package list to pretty-print installed dependencies and their versions.

• aiken package upgrade should fail with a proper error when trying to upgrade a non-existing package.

• (bonus) Support more providers than Github such as GitLab.

Non-goals

• Implement a version resolver: this is overkill at this point and not something we want to do lightly. The current requirement for projects to have to manually specify all their dependencies (including transitive dependencies) is a FEATURE and done on-purpose.

Why is it a good idea?

These commands are seldom used at this stage because we don't yet have a large ecosystem and the stdlib comes pre-defined as dependency when running aiken new. However, the developer experience could still be made slightly better in anticipation and to prevent mistakes.

What is the current alternative and why is it not good enough?

Current alternative is not doing mistakes. It's very easy to mistype a branch name, and catching errors early is usually how we achieve good UX.

[rvcas]

Should we include better version resolution so that projects can depend on libraries that depend on libraries?

[KtorZ]

Not in this task I believe. This is something we need to think a bit more about IMO.

[rvcas]

Ok no problem

[hadelive]

Could I try this task?

[KtorZ]

Sure thing!

[rvcas]

@hadelive no problem, please make a draft PR as early as possible so we can provide feedback throughout the process if you get stuck. Also feel free to reach out on discord for help.

[aleeusgr]

Hi! I added a branch to my fork to work on this and I am researching the issue.

I found a closed PR here.
why was it closed - what went wrong?
Can I reuse the code?
Can the PR's be made more granular (i.e. implementing the change as was planned in the issue above) with other changes following in other PR's?

packages is defined here and add is a member of packages, is that right?

Thanks!

[KtorZ]

why was it closed - what went wrong? Can I reuse the code?

I think this is already pretty explicit from the PR comments? The suggested approach in the PR ended up being not ideal and the overall UX was deemed not good so it was abandoned.

packages is defined here and add is a member of packages, is that right?

Correct.

[aleeusgr]

Add a aiken remove command to easily remove a dependency

should be more straightforward. Is it a better idea to implement it first?

thanks.

[KtorZ]

I've updated the original issue, providing more details on the items and clarifying a few interrogations.

[KtorZ]

(moving this to a discussion)