Is that relevant? Seems to me impact is the appropriate metric.

I’m curious about your position on this.

Back in the day (late 90s if I’m remembering correctly), after experiencing it for a while, when encountering a CPAN package I would roll my eyes… and look elsewhere. I had endless trouble just getting things to build reliably. I always ended up feeling like it took much longer to use CPAN than it did to just download the script. Maybe I am alone in that, but that was my experience. And, of course, much has probably changed since then; in particular the unixverse is much more homogenous than it used to be.

With NPM, I just roll my eyes. But generally speaking it works.

I think part of it comes down to a mix of transitive dependencies (common on both platforms) and a handful of core dependencies requiring native compilation (I don’t think anything in npm does this, but I don’t have the familiarity). It‘s the latter that creates the fragility. I thought I knew make until I had to deal with cross-platform makefiles. If you had the bad luck to want to use a module which had somewhere in its dependency tree a module who compilation had never been tested against your environment, insert gif of mushroom cloud here.

I think you’re right. I used a lot of less common unices back in the day - dg/ux and HP/ux in particular - and I remember a lot of C compiler failures, though I don’t remember much else.

NPM certainly has native builds but with my use case involving the predominant targets (Linux and MacOS) I just don’t hit the barriers I used to.

That said, by the late 90s my desktop was Linux and I still avoided CPAN!

Operant conditioning is a powerful force.