> It doesn't help that, for a long time, the > status quo in all free software web applications > (and indeed all web applications) was to check > java

> It doesn't help that, for a long time, the > status quo in all free software web applications > (and indeed all web applications) was to check > javascript and similar served-to-client web > assets straight into your repository. That really does help, this would have been a short blog post if they were to follow the status quo. Operating systems trying to deal with managing applications dependencies has been a huge source of fustration for me. You cant have jquery randomly upgraded for your application without having tested it, that is always going to cause problems no matter how religious you are with semver. Anyone who has developed erlang on ubuntu can attest to how ridiculous the situation can get (debian split erlang up into seperate packages). I very much lean towards having my dependencies bundled. I have misgivings with npm but it does a lot of things right in that regard.