Same goes for almost any language-specific package manager you could name: Rust/Cargo, Clojure/Clojars, Node/npm, Elixir/hex, Python/PyPi.

No matter which way you slice it, what CocoaPods is doing is a bit daft, especially at their scale.

Small note: Cargo _does_ use an index (not the source code), in git, on GitHub. However, we're already doing the directory layout that they recommend in-thread, so we shouldn't have this specific problem.

Or even the Java community, where you have MavenCentral, JCenter, etc.