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In a fair world, the time and energy that went into Bower would have been spent making npm just a little bit better for front-end stuff. `npm dedupe` is halfway
by brian_c 12y ago
In a fair world, the time and energy that went into Bower would have been spent making npm just a little bit better for front-end stuff. `npm dedupe` is halfway there. Now I have to deal with two arbitrary sources of dependencies.
- GlennS 12y agoCouldn't you say the same thing about time spent on npm which could have gone into apt or yum?
- rblatz 12y agoNot all node platforms run apt/yum. Having a package manager for your platform makes sense.
- pstop 12y agoThe problem I have with apt, yum, etc... is that the packages for development are so old that you're going to be compiling from source and managing your own updates, which is exactly the problem a good package manager should solve.
- stephendicato 12y agoThe big difference is that packages that land in the official apt repositories have been heavily tested by the apt repository maintainers. Anyone can push a package to PyPI for example. There is a clear trade off between using packages from apt/yum and your toolchain's package managers. In practice, I do find it much easier to pin dependencies and install from my toolchain's package manager (pip/PyPI).
- recursive 12y agoWhy do you have to deal with bower? I don't.
- linhmtran168 12y agoA lot of frontend libraries are not on npm.
- recursive 12y agoI don't have to deal with npm either for that matter.
- klibertp 12y agoCare to say what are you dealing with instead? I hope it's not something obvious like "I build Obj-C apps"...
- recursive 12y agoFor the small number of dependencies any of the projects I work on have, I find it easier to download the dependencies in a browser, and just copy them to the projects I'm using. I understand this is heresy.
- xtrumanx 12y ago> I find it easier to... Have you used Bower? I haven't but I watched a video of some guy speaking of Bower who pretty much said the same thing you did but changed his mind after trying it out. I haven't tried Bower yet but kept that anecdote in mind and plan to try it to see what all the fuss is about. From my understanding, a single command will take away all those intermediary steps between deciding to use a library and actually using it. No need to navigate to the project's page, looking for download link, downloading it, extracting and copying to the project directory. Sounds good in theory to me; just haven't the chance to try it yet myself. Mostly because npm happens to have everything I would have used Bower for.
- modarts 12y ago"Small number of dependencies" being the operative phrase. Try managing a complex single page app with deep dependency graphs and each node in that graph versioning up independently. Not sure how your approach would scale there.
- bicknergseng 12y agoAgreed. Bower also doesn't have any notion of version pegging or shrinkwrapping like npm... which is a total production killer.
- untog 12y agoAgreed. I was using Bower until I discovered that most client-side libraries are also on npm. Much simpler.