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Show HN: ied – an alternative package manager for Node

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Re: Show HN: ied – an alternative package manager for Node

#61

Post by tracker1 »

hatsix wrote: post #21
blubbi2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said earlier, it wasn't my intention to name it after a weapon. That being said, it's a three letter name. It's very unlikely NOT to run into naming conflicts here. edge - taken by Microsoft jpm - JPMorgan ppm - taken by Perl package manager: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_package_manager fpm - taken by Effing package management: https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm bpm - beats per minute ayp - terrible to ty…

Yeah, but when people do a google search for IED, what are they going to find? I'd worry less about offending someone because they had to type it, and more about SEO. I'd stick with things that don't have pictures of gore and destruction on the first page of search results. So, that's a really good reason to not. Also, your response was shitty... You specifically state that you chose IED because it's "easy to type"..…

Another Stupid Deployment (ASD)... just suggesting a corresponding name to work with.

Re: Show HN: ied – an alternative package manager for Node

#62

Post by tracker1 »

diggan wrote: post #14
JoshTriplett wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And, managing dependencies is like dealing with explosives anyways... Only funny for anyone who hasn't been affected by one, or had friends or family who were. Still better to avoid names with negative connotations (and search for them first to check). > Any suggestions are more than welcome! A few ideas: bpm - Better Package Manager edge - the thing that connects nodes jpm - Javascript Package Manager ppm - Peer P…

I don't think the name is supposed to be funny. If you're afraid of naming things something just because someone, somewhere in the world have been affected by what you're naming your thing, you'll run out of names.

I always thought the name of git/github was mildly offensive to me... but never really enough to speak out about. Though I think that ASD mentioned above (I added "Another Stupid Deployment") isn't a bad name.

Re: Show HN: ied – an alternative package manager for Node

#63

Post by tracker1 »

dozzie wrote: post #46
msutherl wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the downside? I think it's great. More modularity + distributed responsibility = better.

Delegating things to a library you give up control over any bugs the library has. You can't simply fix the bug like you would do to your code, you either need to fork the library (maintaining a fork has cost), patch it (maintaining the patch is not free), or send fixes to its maintainer -- or any combination of these. Using many dependencies also makes your application a fractal of dependencies. Library you use has i…

And writing custom code to duplicate a library doesn't have a cost? (compared to forking).

I find that using tools like npm, nuget, gems, and the like along with github for core libraries makes managing dependencies FAR better than relying on an internal copy of said package in my project, which is just as risky as an internal fork. Yes, there's a chance the package system can be down while you are wanting to deploy.. that's why you prepare on a staging server, and duplicate that to production. Hell with things like docker, you create your container, and run it with environment variables for which environment it's running against.

Re: Show HN: ied – an alternative package manager for Node

#64

Post by tracker1 »

david-given wrote: post #36
blubbi2 wrote: post #3

Hey everyone! I made this. I'm happy to answer any questions, but please bear in mind that this is a WIP. There is still a lot of work to be done, although feature parity with npm is not the goal. Upcoming features are: * Nix-like rollbacks * built in registry server * discovery + installation via BitTorrent DHT Would love to get any feedback!

Does it support installing packages globally and then having them actually be available , without having to install them locally as well? This is my biggest bugbear with npm, as it pretty much rules out doing shell scripting with node.

If you keep node in ~/bin/, you could symlink your global npm path to ~/bin/node_modules/ .. just a thought here.

Re: Show HN: ied – an alternative package manager for Node

#65

Post by tracker1 »

jmandzik wrote: post #58
blubbi2 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome! Glad it worked that well! Please let me know if you run into any bugs: https://github.com/alexanderGugel/ied

Happy to open an issue, but any plans on supporting git+ssh urls? For work projects, we have some modules installed via git and when I tried to install, I got the same error described here: https://github.com/alexanderGugel/ied/issues/2 Very promising project!

+1 here, git+ssh and git+http(s) are essential imho... its' the easiest way to sidestep the need for an npm server for some internal projects/libraries.

Re: Show HN: ied – an alternative package manager for Node

#66

Post by blubbi2 »

tracker1 wrote: post #65
jmandzik wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happy to open an issue, but any plans on supporting git+ssh urls? For work projects, we have some modules installed via git and when I tried to install, I got the same error described here: https://github.com/alexanderGugel/ied/issues/2 Very promising project!

+1 here, git+ssh and git+http(s) are essential imho... its' the easiest way to sidestep the need for an npm server for some internal projects/libraries.

Agreed. It's definitely on the roadmap. Should be done in a couple of weeks.

Re: Show HN: ied – an alternative package manager for Node

#67

Post by lobster_johnson »

gfosco wrote: post #28

I never thought to myself, "wow, npm is slow." Is that really the core problem this is solving?

NPM 2.x is actually very slow.

Part of that is just the monstrous number of files involved. For example, one of our projects has 48 dependencies, which installs 24,421 files under node_modules. NPM could probably benefit from managing each dependency as an archive.

We do atomic deploys and try to make them reproducible, so for each deploy we do a fresh install from npm-shrinkwrap.json, but even when all the modules are in NPM's local cache it's very slow at copying everything.

Unfortunately, NPM doesn't version the node_modules folder (a package becomes ./node_modules/mypackage/...)), so you can't reuse it. The NPM cache is versioned ($cachedir/mypackage/3.23/...), but can't be used directly. It would be much better to skip the cache altogether, and have node_modules embed version strings (./node_modules/mypackage-3.23/...). Then you could easily share the folder across builds.

NPM is also pretty brittle. We frequently have deploys fail because of transient network errors (repository timing out or similar) that cause NPM to fall over. The dreaded mysterious "npm ERR cb() never called" error still hits us weekly.

(Speaking of reproducible builds: NPM lets people unpublish packages. Sometimes old versions just disappear, presumably because they were unpublished. 6 months later you want to deploy a certain app, and you find it depends on some package X, which deep in its dependency graph relies on package Y 0.3, but 0.3 is gone from npmjs.com, so you have to upgrade for no reason at all.)

Re: Show HN: ied – an alternative package manager for Node

#68

Post by lobster_johnson »

blubbi2 wrote: post #4
macmac wrote: post #2

Unfortunate naming ie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_explosive_device

Damn. Didn't think of that. In fact I literally just renamed it: https://github.com/alexanderGugel/ied/commit/84628b3c871c85d... Originally it was called mpm, but I figured that would have been pretty confusing, but it looks like the new name isn't necessarily better. I'm pretty terrible at naming. Any suggestions are more than welcome!

My suggestion: NIP — a recursive acronym meaning "NIP Installs Packages".

Re: Show HN: ied – an alternative package manager for Node

#69

Post by nateweiss »

blubbi2 wrote: post #4
macmac wrote: post #2

Unfortunate naming ie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_explosive_device

Damn. Didn't think of that. In fact I literally just renamed it: https://github.com/alexanderGugel/ied/commit/84628b3c871c85d... Originally it was called mpm, but I figured that would have been pretty confusing, but it looks like the new name isn't necessarily better. I'm pretty terrible at naming. Any suggestions are more than welcome!

How about MOL - one letter back for each letter, as HAL was to IBM?

Re: Show HN: ied – an alternative package manager for Node

#70

Post by tobych »

blubbi2 wrote: post #4
macmac wrote: post #2

Unfortunate naming ie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_explosive_device

Damn. Didn't think of that. In fact I literally just renamed it: https://github.com/alexanderGugel/ied/commit/84628b3c871c85d... Originally it was called mpm, but I figured that would have been pretty confusing, but it looks like the new name isn't necessarily better. I'm pretty terrible at naming. Any suggestions are more than welcome!

Did you run your name by /anyone/ whatsoever before posting this? I can't imagine that if you'd say, asked three people, one of them wouldn't have laughed at the very suggestion. IED indeed. This is the sort of silly mistake one can only make if one is acting in isolation: to me it's super important in life to be checking in with people constantly when making decisions like this. Typically a couple of people will do it: after that, for me in my circle anyway, the returns diminish. What a waste of people's time and energy on this forum, just because you didn't bother checking with people (I'm assuming). It's kinda selfish of you, in that sense. Well, good luck renaming it, and good luck figuring out where you went wrong.
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