[Question] Long term plans/goals

[Gekctek]

I am a IC dev and am looking to help get Motoko to get to maturity faster
One of those factors is not only building the Motoko libraries but the accessibility/discovery of them

What's the general long term strategy of the MOPS project?
Currently I see vessel and mops but vessel seems to be the 'default' but is essentially just a wrapper around github projects and hard coded project ids.
I am curious if you have thought about vessel as a competitor or rather a different client that can share repositories and work together?

Do you have any plans on developer adoption or is this just in the building phases right now.

I personally have only used vessel so im not sure what the MOPS experience is like right now

[ZenVoich]

Hi! Vessel existed 2 years before mops. MOPS was created as a simple and convenient alternative to the vessel. With MOPS it is easier to manage dependencies and it has a simpler config.

The main difference between them is that vessel works with GitHub repos, while MOPS works with on-chain registry.
Right now @tomijaga working on implementing support for github and vessel.

It hasn't been promoted much in the developer community, but I'll start doing it soon.

[Gekctek]

Small world, @tomijaga has messaged me about some work I've done.
Package discovery is a nightmare right now with Motoko and I'm trying to get a sense of what it should be like in the future. Also since it's web 3 it can be a little more distributed than package repositories today.

Is your current plan to have a central repository or registry of packages? Sounds like you want to do GitHub integration

[tomijaga]

Tis a small world indeed @Gekctek 😄. It's great to see that we both share the same goal of supporting the growth of the Motoko ecosystem! I agree that package discovery is currently a challenge, and a package manager like mops can help address this issue.

I'm not sure about @ZenVoich 's future plans for mops, but I can tell you about the current design. All published packages are stored in an on-chain registry and can be accessed using the search() function. This function is used by the mops website to search for packages, and it can also be called by other Motoko canisters. The challenge now is getting more developers to publish their libraries to mops, which will increase the number of available packages and improve the overall search experience. An interesting idea would be to make mops packages discoverable on a site like kinic.

In terms of the developer experience with mops, it has significantly improved compared to vessel. The automatic installation of nested dependencies and the recent GitHub integration will make it easier for developers to build and publish their libraries.

[Gekctek]

Ya, I think the biggest issue is the visibility. I only hear people talk about vessel.
I am open to helping out you guys if you need it, but currently juggling a few things
But getting people share code and have that discoverable is very important i think