14 - The Seed Bank

Goals

The Seed Bank is an open database of workspaces (Private) (seeds) that anyone can access and contribute to.

Context

Dendron's mission is to help people organize and make sense of information. To that end, we want to make sure that both existing knowledge and newly created knowledge is not just easily accessible but comes with a degree of modularity that it becomes possible to compose existing information and build upon it.

When working with code, the concepts of modules and packages are standard in every modern programming language - these abstractions make it possible to package frequently used code into re-usable modules.

The Dendron Seed Bank is an effort to do the same with knowledge.

Lookup

Prior work that inspred this RFC

Proposal

The Seed Bank needs to define the following components:

specs
- standard metadata for declaring a module and its dependencies
- standard endpoint to retrieve said metadata
- standard methods to perform registry operations (add/remove/query)
~~registry~~
- an endpoint for hosting the registry metadata
- an endpoint for performing API calls against the registry
- an endpoint for hosting the module artifacts
client
- a client that can talk to the registry endpoint

Details

Specs

See configuration for how metadata is stored in seeds

Registry

See Registry for more information

Client

Registry client methods will be added to the dendron CLI (Private) under the registry namespace, or reg for short.

We will also add additional methods to the workspace command (Private) to be able to intiialize a workspace from an existing seed.

See methods for the list of supported methods

Motivating Example

You are interestd in developing your own vscode plugin but don't know where to start. You have a workspace setup already. The following shows how to go about adding a hypothetical vscode seed using the CLI (a similar workflow will be availble when using the plugin )

Look for any existing seeds to do with vscode using the CLI

dendron seeds search vscode

name: dendron.vscode
desc: official vscode docs

Add the docs to your workspace

dendron seeds add dendron.vscode

dendron.vscode has been added to your workspace

Inspect the schema

dendron seeds schema dendron.vscode

# name of the schema 
project:
    nodes:
        code: 
          quickstart: getting started
          api: namespace(true)
          ...

Query the notes

dendron note lookup --query code.quickstart

Resulting configuration

dendron.yml

vaults:
   # local vaults in your workspace
   - ...
   - fsPath: vault
     seed: dendron.vscode
seeds:
  # newly added seed
  dendron.vscode:

dendorn.code-workspace

folders: [
   {
      "path": "seeds/dendron.vscode/vault",
      "name": "dendron.vscode/vault"
   },
]

files

.
└── workspace
   ├── vault1
   ├── ...
   └── seeds
      └── dendron.vscode
            ├── dendron.yml
            └── vault
               ├── dendron.md
               └── ...

Topics

Transitive Dependencies

Next Phase ⏩ (Private)

Lets say seed A depends on seed B and you install seed A

Dendron will pull in all dependencies of seed B as well as seed A

Publishing (website)

Next Phase ⏩ (Private)

By default, publishing is disabled for seeds. If you want to publish a seed, you can set its visibility to public. At this point, the standard publishing configuration (Private) rules appyl.

When you publish a seed, we will automatically add a banner at the top of any page that comes from a seed.

This page is originally published by {author} and licensed under {license}

You can disable this behavior by setting addAttribution to false.

Phases

Phase I

add registry configuration to dendron.yml [2021-06-15 15:55]
add registry methods to dendron cli [2021-06-15 15:55]
add seed resolution logic when dendron initializes workspaces with seeds [2021-06-15 15:55]

Phase II

be able to publish seed vaults when publishing a website
convert seed bank from static file to API endpoint
support a self serve method of publishing to the registery

Future

versioning
support hosting a web version of seeds in the registry
dedup shared dependencies

Discussion

All discussions and feedback should be left in this discussion thread

TradeOffs

Dendron dependency management is modelled after npm node_modules. The benefit is the relatively simple implementation but you can run into latency issues with this approach