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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>>
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