Packages

What is a "Package"?

Pawn Packages are similar in concept to the tools in other languages that allow users to distribute code as self-contained "boxes" of code, documentation, tests and other metadata:

• NPM Packages
• Ruby Gems
• Python Packages
• Perl Modules

All these tools make it extremely simple and quick to get code that someone else has written and use it in your own code. This is one thing that has been missing from the Pawn community until now.

What Does a Pawn Package Require?

At the most basic level, a GitHub repository with a .inc file in it is a Pawn Package. You could add that repository URL to your own Package Definition's dependencies list and it would probably work perfectly.

However, if that repository contained code that required, for example, YSI to run properly - it would not work perfectly unless you manually included YSI in your own dependencies (even if your code did not depend on YSI).

To avoid situations like this, all Pawn repositories on GitHub should include a Package Definition File (either pawn.json or pawn.yaml depending on your preference) which would declare a list of dependencies.

Once we, as a community, reach that point - writing a library that required other code would be trivial!

Examples

See the Examples page for some good habits to copy for Pawn Packages.