Can you explain more about this repository?

[markcellus]

I got redirected here from a comment one of the contributors posted in another thread. I come in peace so please forgive me if this comes off a little crude, but a few questions:

1. What is this package-community? Based on README and the site, it seems that this is intended to be a central place for package manager discussion, but what's the benefit of discussing things here instead of on the repositories of the package managers directly?
2. Is this package community group intended to be a standards body?
3. Are core contributors from major package managers, like npm or yarn, aware of this? Who exactly are they and do they support this effort?

Again, sorry for the straight-forwardness of my thoughts, I'm just being honest and trying to find out more information :)

[iarna]

Hey, so this community mostly exists as a Discord chat as linked to from https://package.community/

It is NOT a standards body, nor does it have any intent to be one, it's intended as a place for folks who develop package managers to talk to one another. It was originally created by the folks who make npm (myself and @zkat).

It was created with the understanding that while we all have different constraints, there's still much we can learn from each other.

In the Discord there are general discussion channels and package manager specific channels. npm uses its package manager specific channel to discuss development in a public setting. Others mostly have their own venues for that, but will use their channels to answer questions from other package manager devs.

Core contributors of all major package managers across languages are at least aware of it (since we've tried to recruit them to it =p). We've seen participation from folks involved with Go's dep, Ruby Gems, Pypi, and many more.

Participation is spikey, based around weather or not we're facing a shared issue. I expect the next thing to bring in broader discussion will be package signing, something that's been widely implemented but has never gotten broad community use.