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Luckily there's still Yarn: https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/install https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/install Honestly it's great that npm 5 seemingly caught up with the

by pluma 9y ago

Luckily there's still Yarn: https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/install https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/install Honestly it's great that npm 5 seemingly caught up with the speed of yarn but that only addresses one of many reasons I'm happy to have made the switch. Npm has been broken in exciting ways for years (and often in the same way for years -- see the infamous race condition in their tar implementation that broke npm publish at random).

mercer 9y ago
So, based on the history of NPM and its issues, is it too harsh to conclude that they don't really know what they're doing, and ditching it for Yarn is probably advisable on general? I mean, I consider myself a relatively novice programmer, so perhaps I'm underestimating the challenge involved, but I'm absolutely baffled that we ended up with 'the standard Node package manager' not being able to produce consistent results when setting things up in different environments. I mean, I've used Gemfile.lock for what feels like ages.
- kevan 9y ago
  It's not too harsh, vote for better tools with your usage.
- pluma 9y ago
  Saying NPM is badly designed is a bit simplistic. As much as I prefer yarn over NPM for all kinds of reasons, NPM's problems have more to do with being born out of a solo project that pre-dates most things we take for granted in Node today. There was no CLI argument parser, so Isaac wrote his own. There was no cross-platform tar bundler, so Isaac wrote his own. Not to mention that there just weren't any best practices in Node or JS for any of what NPM was trying to do yet. Yarn has the classic second mover advantage. The yarn devs learned from NPM's mistakes (there were more people involved than you see in the commit logs -- they even talked to some NPM people during development) and built on the vast ecosystem that exists now. I don't like npm Inc and I think there's a serious conflict of interest in having NPM bundled in the Node Foundation's official releases (people using the NPM client is in npm Inc's best interests, whereas Yarn isn't controlled by a single commercial entity). But blaming NPM's problems entirely on developer incompetence is unfair.

by pluma 9y ago

mercer 9y ago

So, based on the history of NPM and its issues, is it too harsh to conclude that they don't really know what they're doing, and ditching it for Yarn is probably advisable on general? I mean, I consider myself a relatively novice programmer, so perhaps I'm underestimating the challenge involved, but I'm absolutely baffled that we ended up with 'the standard Node package manager' not being able to produce consistent results when setting things up in different environments. I mean, I've used Gemfile.lock for what feels like ages.

kevan 9y ago
It's not too harsh, vote for better tools with your usage.
pluma 9y ago
Saying NPM is badly designed is a bit simplistic. As much as I prefer yarn over NPM for all kinds of reasons, NPM's problems have more to do with being born out of a solo project that pre-dates most things we take for granted in Node today. There was no CLI argument parser, so Isaac wrote his own. There was no cross-platform tar bundler, so Isaac wrote his own. Not to mention that there just weren't any best practices in Node or JS for any of what NPM was trying to do yet. Yarn has the classic second mover advantage. The yarn devs learned from NPM's mistakes (there were more people involved than you see in the commit logs -- they even talked to some NPM people during development) and built on the vast ecosystem that exists now. I don't like npm Inc and I think there's a serious conflict of interest in having NPM bundled in the Node Foundation's official releases (people using the NPM client is in npm Inc's best interests, whereas Yarn isn't controlled by a single commercial entity). But blaming NPM's problems entirely on developer incompetence is unfair.