Re: [Userops] Why is it hard to move from one machine to another? An analysis.

[David Thompson]

Christopher Allan Webber <address@hidden> writes:

> Dave Crossland writes:
>
>> On 8 April 2015 at 11:22, Christopher Allan Webber <address@hidden>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>  - Language packaging for deployment needs to die.  Yes, I say this as a
>>>    project that advocates that very route.  We're doing it wrong, and
>>>    I want to change it.
>>>    (Language packaging for development though: that's great!)
>>>
>> I think this is what set me off ranting about your gestalt thinking :)
>>
>> If language packaging sucks for deployment, it sucks for development.
>
> That's probably true.
>
> Here's a story to back up your point: I recently wanted to get away from
> the oh-too-common antipattern of "check your javascript into your git
> repo" (yuck) which MediaGoblin does because, let's face it, a few years
> ago that's what *all* developers did, and so now we're tearing it out
> and we need an easy way for developers to get those css and javascript
> and etc files in place, and how to do it?  I tried to think up a
> solution, but rightly the community pointed out that my solution started
> to look like inventing a new package manager, and not to do that.
>
> So what did we do?  We added bower, which itself depends on npm.
>
> So now we have *three* "language package managers" (though npm and bower
> kind of come together).  That sucks, especially because when something
> goes bad on a language package manager, it seems like you need a
> language expert to help dig you out of that mess.
>
> On the upside one reason for doing this is to make it so that we have an
> easier story for packagers, where anything currently using bower for
> development should be a package installed with yum or apt-get or
> whatever, but still...

I have the same issue with my web projects.  Upstream JS source files
are checked into the repo that I would have to minify myself.  I don't
minify them because I don't want to depend on nodejs.  Life isn't so
good right now.

This reminds me that I need to write 'guix import bower' sometime, and
'guix import npm' for that matter.  But if I don't have the JS libs in
the source tree, only guix users will be able to run the application
unless I add bower/npm files.  Bleh.

-- 
David Thompson
Web Developer - Free Software Foundation - http://fsf.org
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