The Unity package manager is a bit slow and the UX is clunky, especially the actual Unity import and handling of large packages. (I also don’t like that it stores downloaded packages in %appdata%/Unity, but the structure there is great.
Going through dozens of gigabytes of packages (I’m a bit of a prolific asset store purchaser… OOOH SHINY!) especially in larger projects or at game jams is a bit of a pain.
I can imagine a few python scripts to unpack and repack these packages (after digging through them with 7zip), but I wonder if there are any existing tools or libraries?
i’ve tested some of those unity api calls, and can get list of packages, user info’s etc. after logging in with access token,
next step would be to try to download assets… more info would be nice, to save time.
I maintain openupm and we have a tool called openupm-cli, a command line interface to maintain manifest.json. Well, it may disappoint you that it only modify the manifest.json file, instead of doing all other works. It indeed resolves the dependency graph, but it won’t download the tarball and place it for you. (No plan for such feature).
You seems making two points
the UX of the package manager
the disk space efficient package management, like pnpm vs npm
The second is more interesting for me. But most UPM packages are actually quite small. Asset store purchases could be hudge, but they are not package yet, most disk space consuming ones are not well designed as immutable, make it hard/impossible to share across projects.
For cached asset store purchases content, it’s another story.