Let's Package jQuery: A Javascript Packaging Dystopian Novella -- Dustycloud Brainstorms

The state of packaging of libre web applications is, let's face it, a sad one. I say this as one of the lead authors of one of such a libre web application myself. It's just one component of why deploying libre web applications is also such a sad state of affairs (hence userops). It doesn't help that, for a long time, the status quo in all free software web applications (and indeed all web applications) was to check javascript and similar served-to-client web assets straight into your repository. This is as bad as it sounds, and leads to an even further disconnect (one of many) between the packages that a truly free distro might include (and have to manually link in after the fact) and those of your own package. Your package is likely to become stuck on a totally old version of things, and that's no good.

So, in an effort to improve things, MediaGoblin and many other projects have kicked the bad habit of including such assets directly in our repository. Unfortunately, the route we are taking to do this in the next release is to make use of npm and bower. I really did not want to do this... our docs already include instructions to use Python's packaging ecosystem and virtualenv, which is fine for development, but since we don't have proper system packaging, this means that this is the route users go for deployment as well. Which I guess would be fine, except that my experience is that language package managers break all the time, and when they break, they generally require an expert in that language to get you out of whatever mess you're in. So we added more language package management features... not so great. Now users are even more likely to hit language package management problems, now also ones that our community are less of experts in helping debug.

Leave a Comment