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He missed my most crucial requirement: Can a package manager support more than it's chosen language? Am I forever consigned to vendor lock-in? Every one of t
by Steltek 13y ago
He missed my most crucial requirement: Can a package manager support more than it's chosen language? Am I forever consigned to vendor lock-in?
Every one of these tools is 100% focused on supporting a single language. They go so far as to use that language as the build spec so even attempting to bend it to another platform feels alien. It's okay if I only ever want to use Ruby or Javascript will be my thing for the next decade. But what if I want to take my existing npm or gem workflow or knowledge and apply it to a new language? I have to start all over from scratch. I'll have no idea how to fetch dependencies or package up my stuff for sharing.
If I start to tinker with more than a handful of languages, my head is going to be full of details on package management rather than APIs or library capabilities. Who wants that?
- reiz 13y agoVery good point. I didn't took that into the article because these package managers are all build for 1 single language. But I totally get your point. A language agnostic package manager, or at least a language agnostic repository with a clear defined API, would be awesome! The clients could still be different for each language, to handle language specific problems, but the repository server could be the same.