Christopher Allan Webber <cweb...@dustycloud.org> skribis: > I looked into trying to package jQuery, and it turned out to be quite > the challenge, much larger than I expected: > > http://dustycloud.org/blog/javascript-packaging-dystopia/
Insightful post! > In short, this is another instance where per-language packaging has > helped things grow to a fairly insane state. I'm not sure how we can > ever get jQuery packaged. This is a shame, because many free software > web applications (including MediaGoblin) depend on it. To make matters > worse, I'm sure nearly all modern javascript libraries are like this. This is terrible. As an aside, I’m surprised npm creates nested ‘node_modules’ directories rather than just a flat directory. It sounds as if at run-time there could be several variants of the same module being used, something that most languages do not support (for instance, in Guile, there can only be one (foo bar) module loaded in a given process.) > I'm not really sure what this means for Guix and libre web application > in the future. I'd really like Guix to shine there... but this seems > like a tough thing to overcome. Well, presumably ‘guix import npm’ would be a first step (I hear Dave is motivated ;-)). But then, and that also applies to the other importers, we really need to think hard about updating already imported packages because nobody wants to update those 265 dependencies manually. Then again, I don’t know what the cost/benefit tradeoff is. We get good integration, transactional upgrades, etc. if we have these Node and JS things available as Guix packages, but packaging and maintaining all that is an endless, huge endeavor... Thanks, Ludo’.