Myxa

Compatibility-aware package manager

---

About

Myxa has two goals:

1. Enable package maintainers to safely publish packages without breaks
2. Enable package users to easily upgrade to the latest versions of packages without breaks

How it works

Along with package dependencies, Myxa also tracks the type signatures of each function in a package. When a breaking change is detected in a type signature, myxa publish will require a major version bump.

For large packages, most of the time breaking changes only affect a small proportion of users. If a user depends on feature X in their project, but only feature Y breaks, then myxa update will safely auto-upgrade, even across major version boundaries.

Note: Myxa compatibility checks are compile-time only. Runtime compatibility checks, as you might know, are quite difficult.

Installation

Install using uv

uv sync

Usage

# Initialize a new package
mx init <name> "<description>"

# Show package info
mx info

# Show package info for a specific version
mx info --version <version>

# Add a package dependency
mx add <dep-name>

# Add a package dependency with a specific version
mx add <dep-name> --version <version>

# Remove a package dependency
mx remove <dep-name>

# Lock the package dependencies
mx lock

# Update all package dependencies to the highest compatible versions
mx update

# Check whether there are breaking changes
mx check

# Check whether there are breaking changes, comparing with a specific version
mx check --version <version>

# Check for any changes in a package
mx diff

# Check for any changes, comparing with a specific version
mx diff --version <version>

# Publish to the index
mx publish

# List all versions of all packages in the index
mx index

# List all packages in the index
mx index --no-versions

# List all versions of one package in the index
mx index --package <package_name>

Local Index

Myxa automatically creates a local package index file where published packages are stored. To keep your index file somewhere else you can use the MYXA_INDEX environment variable. The recommended filename is index.json.

export MYXA_INDEX="path/to/index.json"

Unsupported features

Plan to support

• Type references and recursive types
• Upgrade across major versions

Want to support

• Tuples
• Optional function parameters
• Dev dependencies/groups/extras
• Specifying extra indexes in package metadata
• Integration with actual code
• Different upgrade behavior for libraries and applications
• Greater than or equal to constraints
• Upper bounds

Will not support

• Semver patch versions

Package name

Myxa is named after the slime mold Myxogastria, the Ancient Greek word μύξα (myxa), meaning "mucus".