Re:How User Groups Made Software Reuse a Reality
by dhosek on Saturday March 02, 2024 @11:29PM
(#39578430)
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.
Re:How User Groups Made Software Reuse a Reality
by doctor_eval on Sunday March 03, 2024 @05:49AM
(#39580009)
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!
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.