On 29 June 2024 21:20:23 BST, Michael Morris <tendo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>Composer is wonderful as a userland solution to a problem the Internals
>team has failed to solve, but such a critical problem as package
>management being mostly solved in userland
I don't think anyone failed to solve anything. Somebody came along and built a
solution, it worked well, and people adopted it. In fact, so many people
adopted it that we're in the happy place of not having competing tools, outside
of application-specific plugin installers.
Its release cycle is independent of PHP's, which means you can get the latest
version of Composer whatever version of PHP you're on. It's written in PHP at
least in part because there are a lot more PHP programmers willing to maintain
PHP tools than there are C programmers willing to maintain PHP tools.
If Composer (or some new package manager) was marked as an official part of the
PHP project, I doubt it would make any difference to how people find it - users
looking at existing projects find it because it's the first line of the
installation instructions; new PHP users learning from scratch are probably
following tutorials the official project has no control over, which either
mention it or not.
> using a configuration file
>(composer.json) written in another programming language
JSON is not a programming language. It looks a bit like JS, because it was
invented by a JS developer, but was explicitly designed as a cross-language
data format.
Some other package managers use other data formats, like XML, or TOML. There
probably are languages which use their own source code for that configuration,
but I've not come across any.
As I mentioned on another reply, it would take an extremely good sales pitch
for me to pay any attention to any attempt at a replacement for Composer,
especially one that wasn't compatible with its huge library of existing
packages.
If the sales pitch is "JSON is not the best format for package configuration",
count me out.
The same goes for a lot of other suggestions in this thread: I'm going to need
a pretty strong sales pitch to change my hierarchical namespaces to flat module
imports - and more importantly, projects like Symfony and Laravel are going to
need that sales pitch, before they break compatibility for thousands of
applications built on their current packages.
Other parts of this thread are just random rants about things people don't like
in PHP, which I have zero interest in, and have nothing whatsoever to do with
modules or package management.
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]
