The Magnet environment

Magnet tries to replace the git-based Quarks ecosystem (referred to as legacy-Quarks within this website) and will extend it by also covering the binary extensions for the server (which will be named Leptons within the magnet environment) and the future (SuperCollider 3.16?) language extensions, eventually called Gluons.

The need for a package manager seems to be particularly necessary since SuperCollider 3.15 will break the server plugin API, such that all server extensions will need to be re-compiled. Ideally, while re-compiling, people can publish their plugins into the Magnet ecosystem.

What is the magnet environment?

The magnet environment consists of

• A magnet.toml as a project manifest to make the context to run a project explicit, bundled together with a magnet.lock which tracks all transient dependencies
• A CLI client magnet-cli which is used to set up a project, manage its dependencies and takes care of bundling operations for publishing the project on the package index. By publishing a project on the index it becomes a package which can be included by other projects and packages as dependency using semantic versioning.
• A server magnet-server which takes care of authentication and indexing all available packages and serving the contents of the packages.
• A git repository magnet-index which acts as a distributed database for the package index. This will be updated by the server and used by magnet-cli to resolve the dependency tree and request packages from the server.