If I clone a Julia package from git, should the local folder have the ending .jl?

General Usage
1

I am a bit confused:
If I clone a package using the URL provided by GitHub (see picture)

image
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using

git clone https://github.com/OpenSourceAWE/KiteUtils.jl.git

I get a local folder named KiteUtils.jl.

If I do ]dev KiteUtils I get a local folder with the name KiteUtils.

Should the source code of a package in a local git clone have the ending .jl or not?

2

The behavior you see is how it works. Does it matter whether the directory has the .jl on it or not? Not really. I generally put make my packages with the .jl but when you ]dev them they end up in .julia/dev/Package without the extension.

:person_shrugging:

3

Yes, it does matter. I want to dev a package into the folder ~/repos (where the packages I work with live), and I want that dev does not do a fresh clone if an up-to-date clone already exists at that location. Could that work?

It cannot work if the folder names are different.

4

If you clone the repo yourself, you can use ]dev <path to repo> and it will reference it there instead of the default ~/.julia/dev directory.

5

It doesn’t matter to Julia. It’s only a question of what works best for your workflows.

6

It matters. I now do the following:

  • checked out all my dependencies into the folder ~/repos
  • renamed them to the package name without .jl ending
  • added the line export JULIA_PKG_DEVDIR=/home/ufechner/repos to my .bashrc file

Now I can do:

pkg> dev KiteUtils

and it uses the code that is already checked out in the folder ~/repos/KiteUtils.

It seems to work, but only if the package folders do not have the .jl suffix.

7

I’d consider this at least a “friction point” that should be reported at Issues · JuliaLang/Pkg.jl · GitHub

Maybe not a “bug” per se, but I find it surprising and potentially inconvenient that when ]dev KiteUtils creates a checkout, the resulting folder is different from when I clone the repo first and then ]dev the checkout.

8

That’s exactly what I mean with what works best for your workflow. Personally I always develop packages by path.

9

I agree with @ufechner7 and @goerz that this is an annoying friction point. I also always delete the .jl after cloning a repo to my JULIA_PKG_DEVDIR.

The issue is that the preferred workflow by @ufechner7 (and also me) is currently not possible. Our preferred workflow would be to clone a repo to JULIA_PKG_DEVDIR and after that directly do ]dev PackageName, which should then pick up the correct package.

10

For what it’s worth you can clone to whatever name you prefer.

git clone https://github.com/OpenSourceAWE/KiteUtils.jl.git KiteUtils

But if you have already set JULIA_PKG_DEVDIR it seems easier to just do ]dev URL in the first place instead of an doing an external git clone?