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Matthias Runge <mrunge at redhat.com> writes:

> On 13/11/14 15:56, Martin Geisler wrote:
>
>> Maybe a silly question, but why insist on this? Why would you insist on
>> installing a JavaScript based application using your package manager?
>> 
>> I'm a huge fan of package managers and typically refuse to install
>> anything globally if it doesn't come as a package.
>> 
>> However, the whole JavaScript ecosystem seems to be centered around the
>> idea of doing local installations. That means that you no longer need
>> the package manager to install the software -- you only need a package
>> manager to install the base system (NodeJs and npm for JavaScript).
> Yeah, I understand you.

Let me just add that this shift has been a very recent change for me.
With anything but Python and JavaScript, I use my system-level package
manager.

> But: doing local installs or: installing things aside a package
> manager means, that software is not maintained, or properly updated
> any more. I'm a huge fan of not bundling stuff and re-using libraries
> from a central location. Copying foreign code to your own codebase is
> quite popular in JavaScript world. That doesn't mean, it's the right
> thing to do.

I agree that you don't want to copy third-party libraries into your
code. In some sense, that's not what the JavaScript world is doing, at
least not before install time.

What I mean is: the ease of use of local package managers has lead to an
explosion in the number of tiny packages. So JS projects will no longer
copy dependencies into their own project (into their version control
system). They will instead depend on them using a package manager such
as npm or bower.


It seems to me that it should be possible translate the node module into
system level packages in a mechanical fashion, assuming that you're
willing to have a system package for each version of the node module
(you'll need multiple system packages since it's very likely that you'll
end up using multiple different versions at the same time --
alternatively, you could let each system package install every published
or popular node module version).

The guys behind npm has written a little about how that could work here:

  http://nodejs.org/api/modules.html#modules_addenda_package_manager_tips

Has anyone written such wrapper packages? Not the xstatic system which
seems to incur a porting effort -- but really a wrapper system that can
translate any node module into a system package.

-- 
Martin Geisler

http://google.com/+MartinGeisler
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