3 ms·

I just want to point out that Composer for PHP is a great experience.

• alganet 2y ago
  Composer did the right thing: it doesn't handle binaries, SAT for solving a _single_ version for the entire project tree and overall focus on simplicity. You need to handle PHP extensions outside of it. Composer can only warn you if your PHP lacks some compiled part, but won't act on it. It's good separation of concerns (and phpize/pecl already handles extensions very well). You also don't have multiple copies of the same package at different versions. Composer requires that a single version must be compatible. This sounds like a nightmare that would break easy, but it actually works by forcing package providers to be more backwards-compatible. That being said, we often don't use Composer to install tools in a machine, like we do with Python. Composer is there mostly to build standalone projects to be deployed elsewhere. You can `composer global install` stuff, but you often don't need to. I absolutely see this as a win. Tools for my machine should be installed by my OS package manager, not some language specific thing.