On 2/2/13 11:50 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
I can tell you this about Ruby. Its package manager, RubyGems, is one
its greatest assets.
Just because a library has many dependencies doesn't mean it's badly
designed. It could just mean that it's flexible and modular.
When Ruby on Rails 3.0 (a web framework for Ruby) was released it had a
lot more dependencies than Rails 2.0. One reason was it was more modular
designed. They extracted package that could be used without the rest of
Rails, like ActiveRecord (database access), ActiveSupport (a general
utility package) and so on.
Do you rather prefer how most C and C++ library works. They all
implement everything from scratch. String classes, containers,
algorithms and so on. Or they bundle a third party library within their
own library forcing me to use it even though I already have it installed
out of the box.
I agree with all of the above. While knowing very little about design of
package managers, I really appreciate using such (either at Facebook or
for other languages).
It would be really meaningful to the future of D if a strongly motivated
expert in package management would want to propose what it takes to get
us where we should be in that regard.
As a simple question - what would be an existing design that would be
most appropriate for us to take inspiration from?
Andrei
