Or you could add a comment property to the JSON

, comment: "Here is a comment"

npm will ignore it, or may use it in the future for showing comments in some way

On Jan 5, 2013, at 1:54 PM, Eric Mill <[email protected]> wrote:

> It can often be a good idea to add comments for yourself and others around 
> your dependencies, especially on a large project. It doesn't mean you made 
> bad choices about your dependencies. When stuff gets large, it helps to group 
> things, label them, etc.
> 
> As package.json's get used for more and more things (for example, my deploys 
> to my app host involve setting custom fields in package.json that they use to 
> govern DNS and stuff), it'll become handier to have the ability to comment 
> things. 
> 
> Also, to comment things in and out at will, during development. We all do 
> that with things.
> 
> Plus, yes, being able to drop the quotes around keys is nice too. 
> 
> This is why when I make config files for myself, I make them .js files 
> instead of .json. Preface the object with a "module.exports = ", and you can 
> say "var config = require("./config")" very easily. It's a lot more 
> convenient.
> 
> -- Eric
> 
> 
> On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 3:44 PM, Rick Waldron <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'd be more concerned with having configuration options that were obtuse 
> enough to require in-line comments. 
> 
> 
> Rick
> 
> 
> On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 3:35 PM, Ilya Dmitrichenko <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
> Why cannot you add a section on dependencies in the README file? There you 
> can explain in plain-english whatever you wanna say about those dependencies!
> 
> Cheers,
> -- 
> Ilya 
> 
> 
> On 5 January 2013 18:22, Alex Kocharin <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello, everybody.
> 
> 
> TL;DR: I think that JSON is not a suitable config file format, and I want npm 
> to be able to read configs stored in some other way by default. It might be 
> just javascript, or yaml, I don't really care as long as it better for 
> configuration files than json.
> 
> 
> So, there is a dependency list in package.json, and it would be a good 
> practice to have a comment for every line describing why we require that 
> package, why we require that version of that package, what known problems we 
> have and so on.
> 
> But there's a small issue. JSON format doesn't allow comments in any way.
> 
> Right now there are a couple of different ways around it of course:
> 
> 1. Non-standard JSON entries like "@comment": "blablabla". Unfortunately, 
> javascript editors doesn't highlight it as a comment, and it's just plain 
> ugly. Also this violates strict javascript mode, so God knows what trouble 
> it'll cause in the future.
> 2. Keep a commented dependency list in a separate file. This violates DRY 
> principle, so we could update one file and forget to update another. The same 
> goes for /**package **/ hack I believe.
> 3. Use some kind of build system. Just for damn comments in one file?
> 
> Also, there's another wrong thing with JSON, it's too strict. You can't omit 
> double quotes from keys, you can't leave a trailing comma, etc. JSON is 
> human-readable, but it's just not damn human-writable.
> 
> Well... I went for 3rd option for a very long time. We used package.js file 
> and a Makefile that compile js to json. Yes, that's three damn files instead 
> of one. That's an example of our package.js file. 
> https://gist.github.com/4462764 . But a number of supported packages grew, 
> and compiling this slowly became a major pain in the ass. I recently got an 
> issue when I updated package.js, but forgot to compile it, and debugging this 
> one was a quite interesting experience. So, I'm now in a mood of forking 
> things and making all my public packages incompatible with mainstream npm...
> 
> 
> So, there's a couple of alternatives. For example, Travis use YAML, and there 
> is CSON (it's coffeescript version with blackjack and hookers).
> 
> And I think there was a couple of discussions about it. So, did anybody come 
> up with more or less sane idea how to deal with this? What happened to 
> package.json.js?
> 
> 
> Happy New Year!
> 
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