Why Loopback?

[cadojo]

I have recently moved a bunch of Julia packages into monorepo-like projects, and I've consequently had to submit PRs to the General registry to change the project repository locations, specify subdirectories, etc. I realized that all of the published versions for a given package are listed in the Versions.toml file in the registry, and I wondered why TagBot.jl uses a loop-back mechanism when all of the version hashes are available in the file?

For example, user @yakir12 on Discourse posted code which only depends on Pkg.jl which reads available package versions. With minimal modification I think this function does what we would need!

function available_versions(pkgname::AbstractString)
   registry = only(filter(r -> r.name == "General", Pkg.Registry.reachable_registries()))
   pkg = only(filter(pkg -> pkg.name == pkgname, collect(values(registry.pkgs))))
   vs = [ 
      pair.first => pair.second.git_tree_sha1 
      for pair in Pkg.Registry.registry_info(pkg).version_info 
   ]
   
   sort!(vs, by=x->x.first)
   
   return vs
end

I apologize if this is the wrong place to ask this question. If folks agree that reading Versions.toml would be more convenient, I would be interested in helping to contribute this feature / change.