Question about other hosting endpoints

[4z3]

Quick Summary: How hard would adding other hosting endpoints really be?

I just stumbled over this note in https://github.com/elm/compiler/blob/master/docs/elm.json/package.md:

Note: We currently only support GitHub repos to ensure that there are no author name collisions. This seems like a pretty tricky problem to solve in a pleasant way. For example, do we have to keep an author name registry and give them out as we see them? But if someone is the same person on two platforms? And how to make this all happen in a way this is really nice for typical Elm users? Etc. So adding other hosting endpoints is harder than it sounds.

My immediate question was: why not allow fully qualified URLs like e.g. https://cgit.krebsco.de/elm-mapbox as package names? We could still support the shorthand version to mean "GitHub" if we really want to. Has this already been discussed? A quick search of the GitHub issues didn't bring up anything related.

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[dtcaciuc]

I would like to second the request for supporting custom package sites.

We currently use Elm in a corporate environment and our policy does not allow us to host packages on Github. Thankfully most of our apps are small and independent, but for a number of reusable components that we do have, we have to resort to using Git submodules and manual source management, which is very awkward.

This has been a long standing issue with Elm tooling; please considering designing a solution.