Skip repositories migrating from "source.skip.tools" to "github.com/skiptools" this week

[marcprux]

Skip source code repositories as specified in a Package.swift generally refer to the host "https://source.skip.tools/REPO-NANE.git". All this host does is redirect to "https://github.com/skiptools/REPO-NAME.git". For example, https://source.skip.tools/skip-lib.git simply redirects to https://github.com/skiptools/skip-lib.git.

This was originally set up so that if we ever decided to change the organization name, or even the git hosting service, that we would be able to transparently redirect to the correct location and not break everyone's projects. In the intervening time, Skip has grown to be a better known project, and so we are unlikely to change the name (and even less likely to move away from github to another platform), so the usefulness of the source.skip.tools alias has become less of a useful hedge against future change and more of an oddity for the Swift package world, which overwhelmingly lives on GitHub.

Note

Why now? Because the hosting provider that handles the "source.skip.tools" redirect is having a planned outage at the end of the month, which, if it winds up being an extended outage, may result in the host not responding for a period of time, during which anyone's Skip project that needs to resolve Skip library dependencies may fail to get redirected to the actual github.com host. While we were planning on moving to a different redirect service anyway, it seemed better to eliminate this unnecessary point of failure altogether and have repository references simply point at the correct place.

So in the coming week, we will be updating all of the Skip packages to change any and all references of source.skip.tools to instead point to github.com/skiptools. This change should be mostly transparent to any pre-existing Skip projects, but you may experience various warnings in cases of a "diamond dependency" to a skip repository. For example, if your package depends directly on both "https://source.skip.tools/skip-lib.git" and "https://source.skip.tools/skip-ui.git", since "https://github.com/skiptools/skip-ui.git" also depends on "https://github.com/skiptools/skip-lib.git", then the fact that your reference to "skip-lib" has the same identifier but a different URL between the "https://source.skip.tools/skip-lib.git" and aliased "https://github.com/skiptools/skip-lib.git", it will result in a warning.

This warning is mostly harmless, but it can be annoying. If you want to get a head start on the process, you can go ahead and update your own Skip library or application project's Package.swift to start referencing "github.com/skiptools" instead of "source.skip.tools". If you do encounter any issue with this (other than the expected warnings), please do let us know by filing an issue report at https://github.com/skiptools/skipstone/issues. We will let you know once the library updates have been included in a new release of the respective repository.