[Feature Req] Possibility to specify a nupkg cache location

This issue is to discuss a Twitter idea

Initial idea

https://twitter.com/CumpsD/status/680011065250443264 https://twitter.com/CumpsD/status/680011137853820930

Background story

Paket is great because it gives me repeatable builds with versions I specify. I can safely sleep at night knowing if my project builds today and collects dust for 5 years, it will still build with Paket.

However, I don’t always belief things to stay around forever, especially with central package repositories. Things happen. Who can guarantee the packages I use will be there 5 years from now? or 10 years? If I remember correctly, npm had this discussion once, which is why Proget and other proxies exist which cache packages so you keep them even if they are gone from the central place.

Idea

What if I could just tell Paket to store all nupkg files it downloads in a cache, of which I can specify the location. No need for proxy setups or anything, simply run paket, and have it store to a fileshare or something and that’s your “backup”. Later when restoring, Paket first checks your usual feeds, with the existing logic, and if it doesnt find anything (NuGet down, package removed?) it can fall back to your offline cache.

Clarification: This cache location should be possible to specify per invocation, so you can have different ones per repository for example. Cmdline argument or paket.dependencies option?

Discuss!

[forki]

Nice error message:

that said after looking at the code I think we could make the cache into sources. This would probably work

[forki]

Ok after node recent drama I think we shold make “additional caches” a thing.

I see two variants.

1. We specify a network share and store all package versions
2. we specify a folder inside the repo and store only the latest nupkgs

• so you can commit that folder and still gitignore the packages folder