Let's Package JQuery: A JavaScript Packaging Dystopian Novella
dustycloud.org
dustycloud.org
It's quite painful trying to package npm modules in a way that's suitable for distributions like Red Hat/Fedora/Debian. The dependency tree just goes on and on and on, and there are versioning issues all over the shop. And if you want to run test suites in the package build process then you'd better package mocha, tap, tape, nodeunit, should, vows, expresso, jasmine, supertest etc. And all of their dependencies too. And make sure every test in the test suites for every module pass. By the end of it all, you're a broken, hollow shell of the person you were before, but at least now it's possible to run "yum install js-jquery" and get version 2.1.3 :-)
There's now a school of thought in the Rust world that it's easier to just build a static executable and ship that.
If that's where we're headed, I'm extremely sad. Static linking everything is a lazy non-solution, IMO. Rampant duplication, increased resource usage, etc. Not good.
> It doesn't help that, for a long time, the
> status quo in all free software web applications
> (and indeed all web applications) was to check
> javascript and similar served-to-client web
> assets straight into your repository.
Operating systems trying to deal with managing applications dependencies has been a huge source of fustration for me. You cant have jquery randomly upgraded for your application without having tested it, that is always going to cause problems no matter how religious you are with semver.
Anyone who has developed erlang on ubuntu can attest to how ridiculous the situation can get (debian split erlang up into seperate packages).
I very much lean towards having my dependencies bundled. I have misgivings with npm but it does a lot of things right in that regard.
If I want to build a native application (like git, which I often do) from source, it's not like the situation is much better. I have to install the compiler obviously, and I have to manually install the dependencies.
yaourt -Sb git
and it will get the PKGBUILD file for the package and allow you to edit it before building so you can build a newer version or alter build flags. When building a package this way, it will also fetch all of the packages it depends on in order to build and run. You generally don't have to think about dependencies at all.
In Ubuntu/Debian and Fedora/CentOS it is several more commands, although there are probably scripts that do it in a single command. It's still a lot easier than manually hunting dependencies and figuring out how exactly to build a package.
In Debian & derivatives it's just "apt-get build-dep git && apt-get source --build git".
Oh my goodness.
And what would a more complete package look like? "AgentME's bag of useful functions"? Many of them don't make sense to group together.
The overhead is negligible: running `npm install` in production is considered an anti-pattern and because of how npm's dependency resolution works each dependency can have different copies of the same (second order) dependency. The likelihood that there will be version conflicts (and thus duplication) is far smaller when there are smaller more specialised packages instead of a few big ones.
It's not about package size. Nobody cares about package size (except for frontend code but it's fairly easy to pare those deps down to the bare minimum).
Also, nearly all of jQuery's deps are development deps not needed in production. Those deps are only interesting for maintainers -- building jQuery yourself is likely the wrong thing to do. It's only necessary because jQuery doesn't yet expose its "submodules" properly.
npm install jquery
It would be just as ridiculous to complain about how hard it is to build ffmpeg from source by using npm as the package manager.
This isn't really up to debate. There are other package managers for JS, but they aren't replacements for NPM. And no, Meteor doesn't count -- Meteor is its own strange quasi-incompatible microcosm. In fact, some projects which aren't node packages use NPM just to manage development dependencies.
If you're using Makefiles, you implicitly depend on make. If you're using Grunt, you're likely implicitly depending on grunt-cli. NPM allows you to make these dependencies explicit (if the dependencies can be resolved to other NPM packages).
Heck, you can install node packages globally and be able to use them as if they were installed locally.
I don't know how many other ways to say this: what is your problem? As long as your package manager knows how to make the packages visible to node, you don't need NPM as a package manager. But you likely won't want to put all NPM packages in your package manager of choice's repository because there's a metric fuckton of them and system-level package managers have a habit of being horrendously out of date for application-level dependencies.
With regard to dependencies, every node project folder is like virtualenv. And as a matter of fact, every Python developer I know considers the system-level Python packages (i.e. those installed with apt-get or your PM of choice) a pain in the ass and only favours them if installing the package with pip would require a lot of native dev libraries (e.g. the MySQL driver or the XML/HTML packages).
The only thing making NPM a "build system" is its "npm run" command which lets you run the scripts defined in your package.json. And for many projects having a couple of aliases is all you really need and Grunt/Gulp/Make/Jake/Rake is overkill.
Either you have no idea what you are talking about or you're very bad at communicating what you take issue with.
many of those dependencies are testing related including some large dependencies for virtual dom stuff to mock the browser. Plus it uses grunt which, while I don't really like it, it does have the benefit over make that it works out of the box on windows which is something jquery has to support.
And yes, of course dependencies have dependencies. Software depends on other software. All packaging systems have a tree of dependencies.
Does "shrink wrap" mean "bundle"? If so, I strongly disagree. It's possible to explicitly use the exact same versions of dependencies without resorting to bundling all the source/binaries. Guix and Nix are particularly well suited for this.
>And yes, of course dependencies have dependencies.
But you have to admit that the depth of this dependency tree is insane.
Depth of tree is reasonable: if you install them at the top.
NPM doesn't reinstall dependencies that are already above it in the tree. If A depends on B and C, and B depends on (an overlapping version range of) C and D, then B and C will be installed first in A's node_modules directory, and then NPM will install the dependencies of B and C in their own node_modules directories, except that it will avoid installing a copy of C in B's node_modules directory because it already exists in a higher folder.
However, if B and C both depend on D, then NPM will install D in each's node_modules folders. You can run `npm prune` (or `npm dedupe`? I can't remember) to make it lift D up a folder so it only needs one copy.