Plugin search

[finestructure]

Joe @heckj recently suggested we add support for SPM plugins to search and I wanted to capture this here.

His idea is that we parse plugin capabilities from packages and that there'd be a way to search for them in the index.

It should require the following:

• add support for Swift 5.6
• extend product type parsing to handle plugins
• extend search materialised view to contain product types
• extend search filter to allow searching for product types

We've added Swift 5.6 support this week, which was one of the bigger hurdles in this.

Plugins expose .plugin products and it should be quite simple to ingest them alongside the executable and library products we're already reading.

Finally, we'd need to add a new search filter to search for those products. The way I envision this would be a new product filter, which could/should handle executable and library as well as plugin:

product:plugin
product:!executable

[daveverwer]

Just to add one more item to the list above:

• Add "X plugins" next to where we give library and executable information.

[icanzilb]

@finestructure I just found that there is already a thread about searching by product type here. Looking at your initial writeup, what do you think is the use case for using a negative filter? In other words, what's the use case for searching for packages that do not offer a "plugin" or do not offer an "executable" product?

[finestructure]

I think I mainly listed that for sake of completeness, TBH. Simply being able to filter on a certain type should be all we need really. Although I suspect we might get the ! negation pretty much for free IIRC how the filters work, it's probably not really all that helpful!

[icanzilb]

I'm just saying, if the feature is available it needs to be tested and maintained. If we can't think of a use-case maybe we can skip it 🤷🏽‍♂️

[finestructure]

Yea, agreed!

[icanzilb]

Ok, I think at this point #1810 addresses everything saw mentioned in this thread. I think this could be an amazing feature to aid discoverability of plugins