[wpeterson]

It's totally reasonable to host your code on github and to build a package manager that loads the content of a package from it's github repo.

What seems insane is to use a single github repo as the universal directory of packages and their versions driving your package manager.

There's a reason rubygems has their own servers and web services to support this use case for the central library registry, even if the source for gems are all individually projects hosted on github.

[lucaspiller]

I assume they modelled it after Homebrew, which has been working fine doing exactly that for the last 7 years.

That only has 3,000 packages vs 15,000 for CocoaPods or 115,000 for RubyGems.

[philippnagel]

In case somebody is interested in such figures (I certainly am) - NPM has 249,838 as of today [0].

[0]: https://www.npmjs.com

[caf]

I wonder whether you could use a DHT for the package directory.