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> Another reason to switch to yarn. Another reason to stop making dozens of different package managers. Or dozens copies of literally anything. Can you people

> Another reason to switch to yarn. Another reason to stop making dozens of different package managers. Or dozens copies of literally anything. Can you people just talk and work together? These package managers aint rocket science. Look at GNU/Linux: there are only 2 or 3 variations for everything.

diggan 7y ago
> Can you people just talk and work together This is a general problem in technology, not just about package managers > Look at GNU/Linux: there is only 2 or 3 variations for everything. Not true, there is probably hundreds of versions of everything (probably not bad in itself) but 2-3 popular ones that you know about. The reason why we keep seeing new package managers is because people think they can do it better than the existing stuff. And I think it's a necessary step to improvement, but some of the suggested solutions will be crap. But then sometimes something really good comes along and the ecosystem self-corrects.
sime2009 7y ago
> Look at GNU/Linux: there are only 2 or 3 variations for everything. Mostly false. For package management on Linux I can think of 4 just off the top of my head: * apt * rpm * apk * pacman There are bound to be more and this is not counting other approaches like AppImage and Snap.
- benbristow 7y ago
  Don't forget portage for Gentoo and zypper for OpenSUSE
- de_watcher 7y ago
  Totally different. He said "switch from npm to yarn". I can't imagine the phrase "switch from apt to rpm". The difference here is that there is the whole layer of distribution maintainers who do the actual work to ensure compatibility and quality. AppImage and Snap are different beasts emerged from the need to bundle proprietary software. There are around two of them like I've said.
  - pluma 7y ago
    Okay, how many node package managers do you think there are for the npm registry? Bower? Nope, it used github. Entropic? Nope, federated as an alternative to npm Inc's monopoly. JSPM? Nope, it loads modules directly off the web. Pnpm? Ah, yes, this one is actually a replacement for the npm client like yarn although with much less traction. So we have npm, yarn and pnpm. Compare that to apt, aptitude, apt-get, dpkg, synaptic, gdpm, gnome-apt, dselect, wajig, PackageKit, kpackage and gdebi. Sure, most of these are GUI tools or somehow build on low-level tools like apt-get but the point is that "Linux doesn't suffer from fragmentation but JS package management does" is absurd. EDIT: This doesn't even go into there being at least three popular mutually incompatible package systems for Linux (Arch/RedHat/Debian) and every distro having its own registry (or "repository").
- Fnoord 7y ago
  Emerge/portage, nix, ... Even macOS already has Homebrew (Linuxbrew is the Linux equiv), Fink (derived from APT), and MacPorts on top of the App Store and package managers for programming languages like NPM (NodeJS), Cargo (Rust), Gem (Ruby). A nice command to upgrade all of these is Topgrade [1] which does all the upgrades for you, including even Tmux plugins. Of course it comes at the same price of a rolling distribution. Things will break occasionally. As for NPM since the company behind NPM is commercial, and it is centralized, it shouldn't be a surprise that there's alternatives. [1] https://github.com/r-darwish/topgrade https://github.com/r-darwish/topgrade
- Vogtinator 7y ago
  rpm and apt act on two different layers, either you replace apt with dpkg or rpm with dnf/yum/yast/zypper
eeZah7Ux 7y ago
> Another reason to stop making dozens of different package managers. Even better: decouple what is generic / OS specific / language specific into libraries and formats and reuse them. I've worked on many package managers and it's astonishing how every new language reinvents the wheel and makes the same mistakes again. People ignore the history of software packaging every day.
Already__Taken 7y ago
lol what? 2 or 300 maybe. rpm, Deb, apt, apt-get, APK, nix, aptitude, dpkg, aur. some of these are different, or the same, or not. dammed if I can tell. hopefully containers eat them all.
pluma 7y ago
There are literally only two package managers for the npm registry right now. This is akin to apt vs dpkg. There used to be bower, which installed via GitHub directly and has been dead for ages. There are now also several experimental alternatives but they have basically no traction. The newest contestant is Entropic, which was built by former npm developers as a reaction to the problems of a for-profit venture capital funded startup running a centralised registry and controlling the client. So for the Linux comparison (ignoring the actual implementations): yarn and npm are apt and dpkg, Entropic is yum and Bower is pacman. Not exactly proliferation if you consider how many packages there are on npm right now.

diggan 7y ago

> Can you people just talk and work together This is a general problem in technology, not just about package managers > Look at GNU/Linux: there is only 2 or 3 variations for everything. Not true, there is probably hundreds of versions of everything (probably not bad in itself) but 2-3 popular ones that you know about. The reason why we keep seeing new package managers is because people think they can do it better than the existing stuff. And I think it's a necessary step to improvement, but some of the suggested solutions will be crap. But then sometimes something really good comes along and the ecosystem self-corrects.

sime2009 7y ago

> Look at GNU/Linux: there are only 2 or 3 variations for everything. Mostly false. For package management on Linux I can think of 4 just off the top of my head: * apt * rpm * apk * pacman There are bound to be more and this is not counting other approaches like AppImage and Snap.

benbristow 7y ago
Don't forget portage for Gentoo and zypper for OpenSUSE
de_watcher 7y ago
Totally different. He said "switch from npm to yarn". I can't imagine the phrase "switch from apt to rpm". The difference here is that there is the whole layer of distribution maintainers who do the actual work to ensure compatibility and quality. AppImage and Snap are different beasts emerged from the need to bundle proprietary software. There are around two of them like I've said.
- pluma 7y ago
  Okay, how many node package managers do you think there are for the npm registry? Bower? Nope, it used github. Entropic? Nope, federated as an alternative to npm Inc's monopoly. JSPM? Nope, it loads modules directly off the web. Pnpm? Ah, yes, this one is actually a replacement for the npm client like yarn although with much less traction. So we have npm, yarn and pnpm. Compare that to apt, aptitude, apt-get, dpkg, synaptic, gdpm, gnome-apt, dselect, wajig, PackageKit, kpackage and gdebi. Sure, most of these are GUI tools or somehow build on low-level tools like apt-get but the point is that "Linux doesn't suffer from fragmentation but JS package management does" is absurd. EDIT: This doesn't even go into there being at least three popular mutually incompatible package systems for Linux (Arch/RedHat/Debian) and every distro having its own registry (or "repository").
Fnoord 7y ago
Emerge/portage, nix, ... Even macOS already has Homebrew (Linuxbrew is the Linux equiv), Fink (derived from APT), and MacPorts on top of the App Store and package managers for programming languages like NPM (NodeJS), Cargo (Rust), Gem (Ruby). A nice command to upgrade all of these is Topgrade [1] which does all the upgrades for you, including even Tmux plugins. Of course it comes at the same price of a rolling distribution. Things will break occasionally. As for NPM since the company behind NPM is commercial, and it is centralized, it shouldn't be a surprise that there's alternatives. [1] https://github.com/r-darwish/topgrade https://github.com/r-darwish/topgrade
Vogtinator 7y ago
rpm and apt act on two different layers, either you replace apt with dpkg or rpm with dnf/yum/yast/zypper

eeZah7Ux 7y ago

> Another reason to stop making dozens of different package managers. Even better: decouple what is generic / OS specific / language specific into libraries and formats and reuse them. I've worked on many package managers and it's astonishing how every new language reinvents the wheel and makes the same mistakes again. People ignore the history of software packaging every day.

Already__Taken 7y ago

lol what? 2 or 300 maybe. rpm, Deb, apt, apt-get, APK, nix, aptitude, dpkg, aur. some of these are different, or the same, or not. dammed if I can tell. hopefully containers eat them all.

pluma 7y ago

There are literally only two package managers for the npm registry right now. This is akin to apt vs dpkg. There used to be bower, which installed via GitHub directly and has been dead for ages. There are now also several experimental alternatives but they have basically no traction. The newest contestant is Entropic, which was built by former npm developers as a reaction to the problems of a for-profit venture capital funded startup running a centralised registry and controlling the client. So for the Linux comparison (ignoring the actual implementations): yarn and npm are apt and dpkg, Entropic is yum and Bower is pacman. Not exactly proliferation if you consider how many packages there are on npm right now.