JuliaCon 2020 (times are in UTC)

Pkg.update() or What's going on in Pkg-land?
07-31, 15:10–15:20 (UTC), Red Track

Julia 1.0 was released two years ago and with that a brand new, rewritten from scratch, package manager called Pkg. This talk summarizes some of the improvements and features that have been added to Pkg since Julia 1.0 was released and also gives an overview of some of the plans for the future.


The new package manager, Pkg, that comes with Julia 1.0 had many improvements over the previous one. However, just because Julia 1.0 was released, did not mean that the work on Pkg stopped. The biggest feature that has landed is the Artifact system which got added in 1.3. There are however also some other, smaller features that might have gone under the radar, for example:

  • New resolver strategy to reduce the number of resolver errors when adding packages but also reduce the number of unnecessary updates to packages when adding a package.
  • Built-in support for managing registries.
  • Argument passing to the test process
  • Support for instantiating a manifest without a corresponding project file.

In addition, there are some exciting features that are in development some of which are listed below:

  • Offline mode (aka airplane mode) allows one to develop packages in a convenient manner even while being offline.
  • Community driven hosting of packages and artifacts allows for package authors to see e.g. download stats for their packages.
  • Multiple packages in one repo.

This talk will summarize the new features of Pkg since 1.0 and also give an overview of plans and work in progress for future Pkg releases.

  • Contributor to Base and many packages (Pkg.jl, OhMyREPL.jl, PGFPlotsX.jl, TimerOutputs.jl, JuAFEM.jl, NearestNeighbors.jl, etc)
  • Release manager for Julia.
  • Software engineer at Julia Computing.
  • PhD-student in mechanical engineering at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.
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