> Maybe I've missed your point, Ah, ok. I was pointing out there that something we now take for granted, being able to "yarn add foo" (ask a build tool to dow

> Maybe I've missed your point, Ah, ok. I was pointing out there that something we now take for granted, being able to "yarn add foo" (ask a build tool to download and install a foo package/module from the central javascript npm database which collects collective community effort), didn't used to be a thing. It was once "search (on mailing list archives, later on web) for where some author has stashed their own hand prepared foo.tar file (no semantic versioning originally) on some ftp server somewhere (hopefully with anonymous login; and reading the welcome message go by often describing how/when they did/didn't want the server used; and often groveling over directory listings, and reading directory FILES and READMEs, to figure out which might be the right file); download it; check the size against the ftp server file listing to see if it's likely intact (no sums, and truncation isn't uncommmon); check where it's going to spray its files (multiple conventions); unpack it; read README or INSTALL to get some notes on how it was intended to be built, and perhaps on various workarounds for different systems; variously struggle to make that happen on your system; including repeating this exercise for any dependencies; and then hope it all just works, because there's no or only very minimal tests to check that". Python was originally like this. Then there were years of "we're trying to have a Perl-like central repository... again... but we're again not yet quite pulling it off as a community..." There's a story that the python experience was the cautionary tale which motivated having a single officially-sanctioned npm code repository to serve node. Instead of not, and hoping it would all just work out. Using 1990's python was a very different experience than using 2010's python, far more than the difference of pythons 1 and 3. And the 2020's python experience may become something where you can't imagine ever going back... to how you're handling python now.