tea is a decentralized package manager—this requires a decentralized package registry. Our pantries are our tentative first step towards that goal.

What is a Pantry?

Pantries provide consistent metadata about open source packages. This metadata shouldn’t require manual collection, but at this current state in open source it does.

It is collected and duplicated thousands of times. A huge waste of effort.

tea aims to eradicate this wasted effort, though unfortunately, the journey there will require—to some extent—doing that duplication one more time.

Doing it a Little Better This Time

Our format is YAML, which is at least non-proprietary and could be used by other tools without an independent parser. And we’re pulling in data from other sources as much as possible, eg. versions are taken from the “source” whenever possible.

Today

We’re launching with two pantries:

• pantry.core
• pantry.extra

pantry.core is essential libraries and utilities and we intend for its contents to always be up-to-date, well-tested and available for all our supported platforms.

pantry.extra is everything else.

Submissions should go to pantry.extra. Once they are stable and if otherwise deemed appropriate we will move them to pantry.core.

The Future

This repository (pantry.zero) is a stub that will only ever contain this README. The packages contained in forks of this repo will be searchable when using tea/cli itself. Thus decentralizing the upkeep of the open source package graph.

Forks of specific pantries will also be able to inherit functionality from those pantries.

This is not built yet, but it’s a near term goal.

The Future, Future

We love GitHub, but it’s centralized. Open source is too important to have a single gatekeeper.

 

Contributing

Clone the following alongside each other†:

• https://github.com/teaxyz/cli
• https://github.com/teaxyz/pantry.core
• This repo (unless this is pantry.zero obv. (this guide is for forks))

† so an ls shows this:

$ ls
cli
pantry.core
pantry.foo

Keep your tea/cli checkout updated since currently there is unversioned revlock between the two. Also you should update your installed tea/cli frequently!)‡

‡ sh <(curl tea.xyz) updates the installed tea/cli

Note that packages are split across multiple pantries, so to see the package.yml files for all your dependencies you may want to open another editor at ~/.tea/tea.xyz/var/pantry

Create new package.yml files namespaced as per our current patterns under the ./projects/ folder. The package.yml format is not documented (sorry! we will gradually fix this!), but it is not complex, pick an existing entry for tips.

You should verify that your package builds before submitting it.

Builds typically require the Xcode Command Line Tools (sudo xcode-select --install) on macOS and libc-dev on Linux.

$ export GITHUB_TOKEN=…
# ^^ we need a (zero permissions) [PAT] to fetch version info from GitHub

$ export TEA_PANTRY_PATH="$PWD/pantry.foo"
# ^^ this ensures tea know about the pantry you are editing

$ pantry.core/scripts/build.ts pkg.com
# ^^ our build infra is all in pantry.core currently

Packages require a test YAML node. This script should thoroughly verify all the functionality of the package is working. You can run the test with:

pantry.core/scripts/test.ts pkg.com

You don’t have access to the sources here—so eg. make test won’t work. This is deliberate. We aren't testing the source, we’re testing the implementation. You want to write a test that uses the tool.

tea requires all packages be relocatable and cross platform. Our CI will verify this for you. You can check locally by moving the installation from ~/.tea to another tea installation (eg. ~/scratch/tea§ and running the test again.

Now make a pull request! We’ll test on all platforms we support in the PR. If it passes both CI and review: we’ll merge!

§ TEA_PREFIX=~/scratch/tea sh <(curl tea.xyz)

Packaging Guide

Our wiki is our packaging knowledge base. For other assistance, start a discussion.

Build Woes?

PR on pantry.extra and we’ll help you out.

After Your Contribution

We build “bottles” (tar’d binaries) and upload them to both our centralized bottle storage and decentralized IPFS.

tea automatically builds new releases of packages as soon as they are released (usually starting the builds within seconds). There is no need to submit PRs for updates.