Myxa

Compatibility-aware package manager

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About

Myxa enables developers to keep their package dependencies up to date and lowers the risk of unexpected breaking changes.

Sample

Running mx info shows an overview of a package. In this sample, the current package (euler) has taken a dependency on the interlet and jeans packages. The package flatty was pulled in as a dependency of interlet. Yellow version numbers indicate packages with newer major versions available in the index.

Modules are in purple, types are in yellow, and package member names are in light blue and red. Primitive types like Int, Str, and Float are available as builtins. Dict, Set, List, and Tuple collection types are supported as well as Struct and Enum.

How it works

Myxa tracks type signatures for everything in a package. When a package maintainer tries to publish a new version of their package, Myxa compares the package against previous published versions. When a breaking change is detected, myxa publish requires a major version bump.

Tracking type signatures also enables Myxa to support safe upgrading across major version boundaries. For large packages, most of the time breaking changes only affect a small proportion of users. If a user depends on feature X in their project, but only feature Y breaks, then myxa update will safely auto-upgrade to the latest compatible major version.

Note: Myxa compatibility checks do not cover runtime behavior and are therefore imperfect. Package maintainers are still expected to manually bump major versions for runtime compatibility breaks.

Installation

Install using uv

uv sync

Usage

# Initialize a new package
mx init <name> "<description>"

# Show package info
mx info

# Show package info for a specific version
mx info --version <version>

# Add a package dependency
mx add <dependency-name>

# Add a package dependency with a specific version
mx add <dependency-name> --version <version>

# Remove a package dependency
mx remove <dependency-name>

# Lock the package dependencies
mx lock

# Update all package dependencies to the highest compatible versions
mx update

# Check whether there are breaking changes
mx check

# Check whether there are breaking changes, comparing with a specific version
mx check --version <version>

# Check for any changes in a package
mx diff

# Check for any changes, comparing with a specific version
mx diff --version <version>

# Publish to the index
mx publish

# List all versions of all packages in the index
mx index

# List all packages in the index
mx index --no-versions

# List all versions of one package in the index
mx index --package <package_name>

Local Index

Myxa automatically creates a local package index file where published packages are stored. To keep your index file somewhere else you can use the MYXA_INDEX environment variable. The recommended filename is index.json.

export MYXA_INDEX="path/to/index.json"

Potentially upcoming features

• Upgrade across major versions
• Type references and recursive types
• Optional function parameters
• Dev dependencies/groups/extras
• Specifying extra indexes in package metadata
• Integration with actual code
• Different upgrade behavior for libraries and applications
• Greater than or equal to constraints
• Upper bounds

Versioning

Myxa keeps things simple and has only two version slots that represent breaking and non-breaking changes. For ease of communication and at the risk of angering the semver zealots, these are named "major" and "minor" versions.

Package name

Myxa is named after the slime mold Myxogastria, the Ancient Greek word μύξα (myxa), meaning "mucus".