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Show HN: WAPM – Package Manager for WebAssembly

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Re: Show HN: WAPM – Package Manager for WebAssembly

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you run on Windows by using e.g. cygwin, you don't run on Windows. See previous statement about WSL. > wasmer itself doesn't even support Windows First, it will: https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer/issues/51#issuecomment-44... Second, I write code that doesn't run on my terminal all the time, but I need the packages I'm using to be installed and versioned correctly.

Well, obviously both WSL and Cygwin run on Windows (and nowhere else), so, rhetoric aside, could you explain why they are they insufficient for your purposes?

When one says that some development tool has to run in Windows, it is meant to be run by Windows developers, who normally do not use WSL nor Cygwin.

Re: Show HN: WAPM – Package Manager for WebAssembly

#52
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which general purpose package manager works correctly on Windows (not WSL, actual Windows) and Linux? Cross-platform is more important than not creating another package manager. I think a far more interesting question is, does the package repository support falling back to e.g. curl. That would allow those who don't want another package manager to still use the registry.

You should distinguish between "can run on Windows" and "can manage Windows software as packages". Most package managers could probably run fine on Windows; at worst they could use cygwin or, indeed, WSL. Managing Windows software is much harder, but isn't necessary: This is a package manager for WebAssembly packages, not Windows packages or Linux packages. And anyway, wasmer itself doesn't even support Windows.

MinGW is option too.

Re: Show HN: WAPM – Package Manager for WebAssembly

#53

I like Wasmer, but I very much dislike the idea of another major package repository being owned and operated by a commercial entity. They seem like good people doing valuable work now, but that doesn't tell us very much about who the company will be in five or ten years. I've grown uncomfortable with NPM being operated by NPM Inc instead of The Node.js Foundation, but it's a hard thing to change once it's established…

I completely understand your concerns, especially given the issues that NPM had lately. We are an open-source focused company and our success is tightly tied to the success of our open-source solutions. Here are some of the things that we are doing in order to resolve (or minimize) the concerns: * Completely open API to retrieve the registry data (it's a work in progress, but our GraphQL API is open to everyone to us…

> * De-centralized hosting of the packages (news to come soon!)

Given that "integration in package managers" is a big point in the IPFS 2019 Roadmap[0], I'm going to guess those two are related.

[0]: https://blog.ipfs.io/78-ipfs-2019-roadmap/

Re: Show HN: WAPM – Package Manager for WebAssembly

#55
post #23

Do wasm modules depend on one another? I assumed they were statically linked. It feels like this is more of a wasm "app store".

WASM dynamic linking: https://webassembly.org/docs/dynamic-linking/

I don't think WAPM has any particular support for this (yet?), though.

Re: Show HN: WAPM – Package Manager for WebAssembly

#56

I like Wasmer, but I very much dislike the idea of another major package repository being owned and operated by a commercial entity. They seem like good people doing valuable work now, but that doesn't tell us very much about who the company will be in five or ten years. I've grown uncomfortable with NPM being operated by NPM Inc instead of The Node.js Foundation, but it's a hard thing to change once it's established…

WASM should use something like GO where you can use any git/mercurial/bazaar repository to fetch the packages and 3rd party services(i.e godoc.org) to index them.

Not a good idea. Semver range on dependency plus lock file is the holy grail of dependency management (ask Maven people) and cannot be done with git (cvs) registries. You’re tied to pinned versions (lockfile) only.

Re: Show HN: WAPM – Package Manager for WebAssembly

#57

So this is a package manager like yum or apt-get, not like npm. Seems reasonable, I guess, though the power of wasm is that it can be run without install, like a webpage. We'll see if this catches on.

does that mean everything installs globallu by default. if there is one thing I love about npm it's that it's local by default and global is the exception.

Re: Show HN: WAPM – Package Manager for WebAssembly

#58

anyway, sounds really cool and hoping it gets inspired by things like bundler/homebrew more than npm/yarn. btw it has "telemetry" enabled by default. edit: thanks for the link, didn't find the source previously

The CLI is open-source: https://github.com/wasmerio/wapm-cli We are also planning to open-source the registry as well :)

Ahhh cool. The GitHub link on the bottom of the page just goes to this empty GitHub repo:

https://github.com/wapmio

So I initially thought it was all closed source. Maybe add more GitHub repo links, so people can find the right stuff? :)

Re: Show HN: WAPM – Package Manager for WebAssembly

#59

I like Wasmer, but I very much dislike the idea of another major package repository being owned and operated by a commercial entity. They seem like good people doing valuable work now, but that doesn't tell us very much about who the company will be in five or ten years. I've grown uncomfortable with NPM being operated by NPM Inc instead of The Node.js Foundation, but it's a hard thing to change once it's established…

I completely understand your concerns, especially given the issues that NPM had lately. We are an open-source focused company and our success is tightly tied to the success of our open-source solutions. Here are some of the things that we are doing in order to resolve (or minimize) the concerns: * Completely open API to retrieve the registry data (it's a work in progress, but our GraphQL API is open to everyone to us…

How are you going to make money? How are you going to fund offices in CA + developers + the operating costs of the registry?

I really don’t think a private entity should be running a registry. Ruby is just about the only example of a registry handled correctly - via the community and non-profits.

Re: Show HN: WAPM – Package Manager for WebAssembly

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely understand your concerns, especially given the issues that NPM had lately. We are an open-source focused company and our success is tightly tied to the success of our open-source solutions. Here are some of the things that we are doing in order to resolve (or minimize) the concerns: * Completely open API to retrieve the registry data (it's a work in progress, but our GraphQL API is open to everyone to us…

How are you going to make money? How are you going to fund offices in CA + developers + the operating costs of the registry? I really don’t think a private entity should be running a registry. Ruby is just about the only example of a registry handled correctly - via the community and non-profits.

Ruby is an example of it done so wrongly that other languages are chopping their hands off to avoid making the same mistakes. Apparently there is a namespacing in the Ruby repository and Github started automatically pushing every fork to the repo as a gem. So fnord123/cool-project would also have intertextuality/cool-project just because you forked it. And it was a nightmare to figure out which one was the right one.

Now the Rust team avoids namespaces like the devil citing the Ruby issue even though there are people begging to have something like Java's scheme since it works.

So really, Java is just about the only example of a registry handled correctly - distributed and namespaced and signed.

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