wire: make wire package publicly import-able about wire HOT 10 OPEN

What about moving Wire to its own repo so that it can be used (both as a package and as a command) with projects other than Go Cloud? Separate FR?

from wire.

Wire can already be used independently of any other parts of Go Cloud (see #230 where a similar request was made). This issue is purely about making wire/internal/wire (the Wire code generator and analysis) accessible to tooling.

from wire.

Sg. #230 seems to address the library use case.

re: the command use case, go get github.com/google/go-cloud/wire/cmd/wire still pulls in all of go-cloud.

#273 would cover both.

from wire.

go get github.com/google/go-cloud/wire/cmd/wire will download all of Go Cloud's source, but it will not pull in all of its dependencies, which is order of magnitudes larger.

from wire.

(continuing discussion from #59).

I'm not sure I'm convinced that this is a good idea. It exposes a much wider API surface for wire with no clear use case.

I can imagine wanting to add things like .dot visualization (#42), etc. -- but can't we accept those as feature requests/contributions for wire itself?

from wire.

We could. I'm just imagining a long tail of feature requests for different aspects of the data, and think it would be better for Wire to export the data in a useful format rather than trying to build and maintain all of possible uses of it.

from wire.

I hear you, but IMHO it's premature to try to expose a "useful format" without knowing what the use cases are or how the data will be used. We can start with a small API surface (basically, just the command line); if a long tail of feature requests comes along, we can always add a new way to expose internals later. It might be a public import for the library, or it might be a .csv output from the command line, or ...?

from wire.

IMHO we should remove this API surface before Beta; we can always add it later if there is demand.

@zombiezen @shantuo

from wire.

Why? It's in an internal directory. Removing it would cause code and test restructuring for little gain AFAICT

from wire.

Ah, you are right -- this bug is about changing it so that the API is public, not the other way around. Removing from Beta....

from wire.