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Entropic – A Federated Package Manager for JavaScript

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Re: Entropic – A Federated Package Manager for JavaScript

#31
post #20

The thing I don't get, is, I'm using Git repos as source for my packages for years now, why can't everyone do this?

Not everyone tags releases so you're stuck if you need a fixed version of a dependency. Or you can tie it to Github and then download a release from their CDN.

I'm pretty sure you can use a commit hash as a version, too.

Re: Entropic – A Federated Package Manager for JavaScript

#33

As "life finds a way", I believe packages will find a way too. If npm stops being the go-to solution, another one will take its place, naturaly adopted by the community, following the path of least resistance. Centralized or not. It does not really matter. What does matter is the code that's being downloaded. Modules dependencies management is an old problem, countless of tools have tackled. Is the node and front pro…

Forgive me for being a contrarian but I see nothing more than yet another Stallmanist rant in this?

Ceej and company are trying to portray NPM as the villain here, but is the entire JS ecosystem's burden their's to carry? They keep whining that Roald Dahl is miserable and all despite inventing Node and why the NPM founder is so rich with VC money, etc. According to me, therein lies their hypocracy:

On one hand, you declare your altruism and how you care about commons and not money but on the other hand, you try to imply guilt on those who try to earn money out of JS ecosystem! How is this fair? You do your job and let them do theirs, I don't see how NPM is made the villain here?

Re: Entropic – A Federated Package Manager for JavaScript

#34
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please explain how APT limits freedom?

I take it to mean that with npm there is a very low barrier for entry. I mean it's not difficult to actually host an apt repo on your own server or on S3, but there's still more you need to know to get to that stage. I personally think that using something like apt for Node.js dependencies is a very good idea. I work with Node at work and on the side, and my/our usual stack is either Debian or Ubuntu. Even when Docke…

I am trying to understand why we make NPM such a big deal (and suddenly have all these projects born to solve the NPM problem) when people have solve the issue of a package repository already. C j Silverio's point (JSConf's talk [1]) was that is NPM's scale that makes it hard.

Refs:

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO8hZlgK5zc

Re: Entropic – A Federated Package Manager for JavaScript

#36

As "life finds a way", I believe packages will find a way too. If npm stops being the go-to solution, another one will take its place, naturaly adopted by the community, following the path of least resistance. Centralized or not. It does not really matter. What does matter is the code that's being downloaded. Modules dependencies management is an old problem, countless of tools have tackled. Is the node and front pro…

Forgive me for being a contrarian but I see nothing more than yet another Stallmanist rant in this? Ceej and company are trying to portray NPM as the villain here, but is the entire JS ecosystem's burden their's to carry? They keep whining that Roald Dahl is miserable and all despite inventing Node and why the NPM founder is so rich with VC money, etc. According to me, therein lies their hypocracy: On one hand, you d…

My point was : node is just a web server and npm just a package manager. There was countless before, there will be countless after, we will continue to code with or without. I have worked with a few technologies and in a few industries and package management is always complicated. The nature of the package management tools are not that important.

The passion that this kind of topic seems to unleash looks like the consequence of a terrible fear a loosing control over an irreplaceable tool. But no tool is irreplaceable : if you can't/don't want to(for political reasons) use node, npm or even javascript just use something else.

That just it. I have no opinion about who makes money from what. At least, not in this thread.

Re: Entropic – A Federated Package Manager for JavaScript

#37
post #10

It is interesting to see the package management approach Deno (Ryan Dahl’s new project) is taking. It has stated as an explicit goal to make the package manager part of the same deno runtime. It tries to achieve this by supporting a native webstandard for modules out of the box. The approach seems to be partially inspired by the go 1.14 module system.

I like this approach too. npm at least, and perhaps other package managers, are replicating DNS a bit too much for my taste, by providing their own (centralized) namespace. Why not use the existing namespace that is DNS (which is decentralized). It's pretty nice to be able to host my packages on my own servers with my own domain name.

Re: Entropic – A Federated Package Manager for JavaScript

#39

One of the slides says: > they hired a CEO who made some, um, interesting moves What is this referring to?

Previously, https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/01/npm_layoff_staff/

Yesterday, https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/06/14/npm_union_busting_c...

Re: Entropic – A Federated Package Manager for JavaScript

#40
post #37
post #10

It is interesting to see the package management approach Deno (Ryan Dahl’s new project) is taking. It has stated as an explicit goal to make the package manager part of the same deno runtime. It tries to achieve this by supporting a native webstandard for modules out of the box. The approach seems to be partially inspired by the go 1.14 module system.

I like this approach too. npm at least, and perhaps other package managers, are replicating DNS a bit too much for my taste, by providing their own (centralized) namespace. Why not use the existing namespace that is DNS (which is decentralized). It's pretty nice to be able to host my packages on my own servers with my own domain name.

Usually the motivation is that the federated package names are much longer than the centralized short package names.
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