What is the purpose of Packaging tag in manifest file?

[janihur]

The documentation gives many manifest file examples with

<Packaging>module</Packaging>

but I see there no documentation about the tag?

I also noticed Packaging tag is not included in the manifest file exported with package command (IPM v0.9.1).

[isc-tleavitt]

Another highly delayed response:

One of the inspirations for IPM is Maven, which supports different forms of packaging; see e.g. https://www.baeldung.com/maven-packaging-types.

"module" packaging just means "the artifact for this package is a compressed archive of the raw source contents and should be treated as such". There was original design intent to support different forms of packaging, but we haven't really explored this ever (in a way that would actually use the Packaging tag).

Because multiple artifacts could look like a compressed archive, having this at the top level is important (in addition to / independent of the lifecycle class) to indicate how the artifact should be treated.

A package can also be packaged as a Studio Project (see https://github.com/intersystems/ipm/blob/main/src/cls/IPM/Lifecycle/StudioProject.cls), and there could be revisited intent at some point to allow packaging IRIS.DAT files for scripted deployment external to IPM.

We should add doc for all of this.