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A lot of what a package manager does isn't really language dependent. It seems like it would be possible to build a generalized package manager that has hooks f
by thayne 3y ago
A lot of what a package manager does isn't really language dependent. It seems like it would be possible to build a generalized package manager that has hooks for a language specific plugin to control how the package is extracted, how to resolve transitive dependencies, and how to do any additional build steps. It would be sort of analogous to how instead of building a full IDE, you can implement an LSP server and get support from existing IDEs and editors.
- throwaway2037 3y agoHigh level: I appreciate the point being made here. Challenge: If true, why does it not already exist? Idea: Apache Maven repositories use pom.xml to define dependency trees. Why don't these get used more for non-Java'ish languages? Mind you, I am not advocating to use Apache Maven as a build tool. I am noting that (remote) repos and their dependency metadata are a huge achievement in that ecosystem.
- thayne 3y ago> If true, why does it not already exist? Because no has put in the effort to build it and get it adopted. You could also ask why we didn't have something like LSP earlier. In order for such a project to become widely adopted it would need to work well for at least a few popular languages, and work at least approximately as well as the native package management solutions for those languages. And it would need to be easy to use. You can kind of use some existing tools, such as maven, bazel, even npm, for other languages, but it usually isn't as nice of an experience.