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Comment by jshen | Hacker News Reader

Node does it better as well. So does java with maven which has been the dominant way to do it in java for over a decade.

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I would not use Node as an example of good packaging. It really hasn't been that long since left-pad. Then there's the fact that you still have multiple different tools to do the same thing (npm vs. yarn) and the end result node_modules/ is a fucking mess anyways.

    find node_modules/ -name "node_modules" | wc -l
         327

I think you can certainly use Node as an example of much better developer experience. Even the difference between npm and yarn is fairly minimal, and there is a solid community 'default' in Yarn.

I think part of the reason we ended up with so many trivial libraries and dependencies in the Node ecosystem was precisely because it is so easy to create and publish packages.

I love Python as a language, but working with the packaging even just to install dependencies is like pulling teeth every time you start a new project - nevermind publishing packages yourself.

No it's not... 99.9% of the time, installing dependencies is a breeze. Packaging is where the issue lies, but pulling those dependencies down is painless. You run one command and everything works. Unlike say npm/node/yarn where 50% of the time after coming back to work on a project your node_modules is broken and you have to either reinstall npm or node or node + npm.

The problem we're talking about isn't "installing a dependency", the problem is creating reproducible builds across people and between dev and production. The secondary problem is managing dependencies over the long run (updating, transitive dependencies, etc). Ruby/Bundler does this so much better than requirements.txt by a long shot.

Node's packaging story sucks in many ways, but IMO python's is worse. I spent quite some time working with python when there was no first-party dependency sandboxing (i.e. there was virtualenv but no venv) and even today there are tools that work with one but not the other.

That said, PEPs 517 and 518 sound like they're going in the right direction from the article.

ied ( http://gugel.io/ied/ ) had a great idea for reducing redundant installations in node_modules/, I wish the project got some traction. It worked as advertised when I used it 4 years ago.

That’s a different issue than the one we’re talking about here.

Maven is “so good” that people wrote another tool on top (Gradle) so they don’t have to touch the Mavenstrosity. More or less like Maven was built to get rid of that other nightmare, Ant.

Maven isn't as good as bundler or npm for sure, but it's better than the mess that is the python communities solution.

left-pad comes to mind when you mention Node.

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