How to find package information for an older version?

[nick1989Gr]

I would like to use https://swiftpackageindex.com in order to see package information for an older version. For example when I want to look on the data for Moya/Moya I hit https://swiftpackageindex.com/Moya/Moya. Currently the latest version is 15.0.3. What if I want to check the package information for 15.0.2. Is there a way to do this?

[daveverwer]

Hi @nick1989Gr

I'm sorry but we do not keep old package metadata. We do keep documentation for older versions, but only if they host documentation with us (which Moya does not) but we don't keep any of the old compatibility or other metadata.

Is it compatibility information you were interested in? If not, what is your use case for the older data?

[nick1989Gr]

Thank you for the quick response. I am mainly interested in License information depending on the version. Sometimes package licenses change from version to version. So ideally I would like to be able to check the license of a package on a certain version.

[finestructure]

This is pretty straightforward on Github directly - would that work for you? For example, here's the full licensing history: https://github.com/Moya/Moya/commits/master/License.md

Or you can view the file at certain revisions via the version picker:

[nick1989Gr]

@finestructure Thanks for your suggestions. Indeed these are valid ways of finding out if a package license has changed. Ideally I was looking for an API to get data in the form of [version, license name]. I already know that swiftpackageindex does not provide an API yet so I was trying to figure out if there is a way to get that data from https://swiftpackageindex.com/. For example I can scrape the License of Maya/Maya from https://swiftpackageindex.com/maya/maya. Ideally I would like to do that also for older versions.

I guess I can achieve the same by getting all the releases from a Swift github repo, fetching the License file and then using a license classification algorithm. I was hoping there is an easier way to do this.

[finestructure]

If you're looking for an API, you could use the Github REST API directly. The license endpoint has a ref parameter to query by version. We're doing the same thing more or less, you might as well cut out the middle man 🙂