Are Open-CMSIS Packs intended to be open such that anyone will be able to publish packages, or they will remain Arm or vendor centric?

[ilg-ul]

In the initial Arm specs, the CMSIS Packs were expected to be submitted to Arm, who maintained an index of available packages.

Later on, vendors were allowed to publish their own packages on their own servers, but the index remained in Arm's care, and there were many situations when the index was not updated to reflect the latest vendor releases.

In the current proposals I saw a more elaborate definition for the index files, but it is not clear who will manage them.

And, more importantly, it is not clear how independent developers can publish their own packages, how would someone search for available packages, and how would they be consumed from such 3rd party servers/repositories.

Are the Open-CMSIS Packs going to remain closed to vendors, or do you consider opening them to anyone?

---

FYI, in the npm world, the open design of the central repository (npmjs.com) was a major step forward, allowing any developer to conveniently publish packages, without requiring any human intervention or approval.

The result was the most successful package repository in the industry, currently with more than 2 B downloads per day.

Thanks to the very open design of npm, the xPack packages can also be published in npm repositories, so they can fully benefit from the existing infrastructure.

If you will ever consider opening CMSIS packs to anyone, probably you should adjust your design and consider open package repositories.