Hi Sebastian, Well SPI would more be part of the language, right? And API would not be a „plc4x-api“ but a „plc4j-api“, „plc4go-api“, „plc4py-api“ right?
Dammit … you already mentioned most of my objections 😉 Yes we would be adding 10 repos … and even if we would not release the API modules if nothing has changed, still would we need to release all language modules. Or we only release language modules, if we worked on them (However then I think we’ll simply stop releasing some of them and effectively move them to some sort of project attic). We also need to keep in mind, that our code-generation is Java based, so you’ll not really make things 100% native by splitting up. Also should we not forget, that we have quite some interdependencies … like we use the PLC4J part to generate part of the documentation for the website. The reasoning I do understand and I have seen this type of discussion before. In Apache Cocoon the project switched to releasing only modules that had changes. This was a very clean approach, but from a user-perspective it was a nightmare. If you wanted to use module X you had to search for which API version that works with. Many issues here also only popped up at runtime, which made things even worse. I do like your idea of a sub-module … so far we only have GO as one of these source-based repos, right? Couldn’t we simply create a new repo and mount part of the PLC4X repo there? Or we simply fork out the PLC4Go module and link it back in via git-submodules? In general I would be in favor of one repo per language. Especially as it seems I might really get funding and then I would start working on the SPI 3.0 for PLC4J … if we didn’t move PLC4J in this new repo, but I would start building a completely new one there, this would simplify things. Chris Von: Sebastian Rühl <[email protected]> Datum: Donnerstag, 20. November 2025 um 16:58 An: [email protected] <[email protected]> Betreff: Suggestion to introduce dedicated repos for API, SPI and languages Hi together, after some thoughts and discussions it came clear that it would be a good move to introduce dedicated repos for: - API (plc4x-api) - SPI (plc4x-spi) - Lanugages (plc4j, plc4go, plc4py) The idea is to have it like in slf4j. They have their slf4j-api package and then different implementations that you can throw in. For plc4x we could have the same where the version of the API then really reflects changes on the API itself, the SPI would be the driver-devel-kit and the languages could have their own repo without all other languages interfering (The current approach for example is a nightmare for source based languages like Go where you always pull in this huge behemoth of our mono-repo plc4x). We can still keep plc4x as monorepo and then pull in the parts as subtree/git-submodules so we can keep that as compability/convenience. One could say: oh but now I need to release 10 repos. But I would counter to that: why would you need to release, lets say the API, if nothing didn't change there. Also what I quite like on this approach that it could allow for drop in replacements for other OpenSource solutions or even commercial offerings. Also that would put PLC4X in a spot where it belongs to: A API for PLCs. :) So my vote would be with a big +1 to introduce new repos and have that all a bit more manageable. - Sebastian
