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Author here. This is currently at the stage of an afternoon thought experiment, but I’m interested in your feedback and help! Probably the most important open

Author here. This is currently at the stage of an afternoon thought experiment, but I’m interested in your feedback and help! Probably the most important open issue is that simple names aren’t a sufficient identifier with a decentralized registry: you need a URL. So once Crom learns how to save package metadata, it should probably map any specified short name (e.g., `d3-format`) into a full URL (https://github.com/d3/d3-format https://github.com/d3/d3-format) to ensure stability. Mutable releases are also a concern, but Crom could save the hash of installed packages so you’d know if anything changed. And of course, since it’s decentralized, you could still have third-party registries that make immutable copies, if that’s your thing.

k__ 11y ago
Nix wasn't a possibility?
- mbostock 11y ago
  How does Nix find packages? E.g., how does `nix-env --install firefox` get mapped to a specific package?
  - k__ 11y ago
    As far as I know there are channels with nix-expressions (which are the package definitions), which are descriptions of how gather the source-code or binaries from specific URLs. npm2nix for example only uses npm to gather the the packages from the registry, but uses Nix for all the other stuff. [0] [0]: http://sandervanderburg.blogspot.de/2014/10/deploying-npm-packages-with-nix-package.html http://sandervanderburg.blogspot.de/2014/10/deploying-npm-pa...
    - mbostock 11y ago
      It’s hard to tell how much overlap there is. One of way of looking at Crom is that it provides a more convenient interface than a URL, yet without the centralization that comes from using names in a registry. Crom helps you go from a name to a URL (via search heuristics), but it’s the URL that ultimately serves as the identifier. So, if you author a package.json with a name like “d3-format”, that gets expanded to a full URL, perhaps with interactive confirmation. (Or not, because it’s trivial to undo and redo.) Also, unlike a URL to the ZIP file directly, a package URL in Crom supports semantic versioning: it refers to all versions of a project, and thus you can upgrade or specify a desired version range.

k__ 11y ago

Nix wasn't a possibility?

mbostock 11y ago
How does Nix find packages? E.g., how does `nix-env --install firefox` get mapped to a specific package?
- k__ 11y ago
  As far as I know there are channels with nix-expressions (which are the package definitions), which are descriptions of how gather the source-code or binaries from specific URLs. npm2nix for example only uses npm to gather the the packages from the registry, but uses Nix for all the other stuff. [0] [0]: http://sandervanderburg.blogspot.de/2014/10/deploying-npm-packages-with-nix-package.html http://sandervanderburg.blogspot.de/2014/10/deploying-npm-pa...
  - mbostock 11y ago
    It’s hard to tell how much overlap there is. One of way of looking at Crom is that it provides a more convenient interface than a URL, yet without the centralization that comes from using names in a registry. Crom helps you go from a name to a URL (via search heuristics), but it’s the URL that ultimately serves as the identifier. So, if you author a package.json with a name like “d3-format”, that gets expanded to a full URL, perhaps with interactive confirmation. (Or not, because it’s trivial to undo and redo.) Also, unlike a URL to the ZIP file directly, a package URL in Crom supports semantic versioning: it refers to all versions of a project, and thus you can upgrade or specify a desired version range.