Hunting for Gems: How Ruby's package management system evolved

Post by hosh » Mon, Sep 30, 2024, 2:15 PM UTC

noirscape wrote: post #8

hosh wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s even worse when npm install modifies the package lock file. It also doesn’t understand how to get packages from a git source. From a release engineering perspective, this drives me batty.

As I understand it, the idea is that npm install is what's used during development, while npm ci/clean-install is what you use for deployments and your CI system. It makes the pretty heavy assumption that a developer will always be able to bugfix the version differences.

But then that means the version you use to develop is not necessarily the version you end up in production. Or that the version one developer uses is not the same version another developer on the same team uses.

Post by weaksauce » Mon, Sep 30, 2024, 5:58 PM UTC

Onavo wrote: post #9

weaksauce wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i’ve said before that it’s like the npm people have made the worst possible design choice whenever asked for a decision. it’s insane how bad it is compared to bundler or comparable package management tools.

No, I strongly disagree. Npm may have some weird ergonomics and defaults, but as a dependency manager it is first class. Before npm, almost all dependency managers suffered from the diamond dependency problem. Npm pioneered allowing multiple versions of packages to be simultaneously installed without having to chase down conflicting dependencies as long as the package involved is not a major framework (i.e. peer depe…

> You cannot do this in most other languages like Ruby Python Dart C++ etc.

for good reason. I strongly disagree that what you say is a good thing. you are describing a failure of the javascript ecosystem as a whole where pulling in a package for some trivial(leftpad) task is seen as a good thing and that having incompatible versions of them being able to be installed at the same time is a good thing instead of an indictment on the system. I stand by my statement that they have made the wrong decision at ever step.

Re: Hunting for Gems: How Ruby's package management system evolved

Re: Hunting for Gems: How Ruby's package management system evolved