[throwaway2016a]

I'm confused as to why composer (PHP) got an X for "Central package repository"... isn't Packagist a central registry? And other package managers allow packages from source.

I'm not arguing the point just trying to understand the decision.

[jadell]

You're not actually downloading the package from Packagist. It acts only as a metadata repository that points you to a source repository. For the others, I would assume they act as both a metadata and a source repository.

[throwaway2016a]

Thanks for the clarification. I'm shocked it is the only one like that.

[mfer]

It takes a bit of work to store versions and manage them as a central repo. Composer will fetch the sources, as a tarball from GitHub if possible, and cache them locally. They are skipping being the central store and deferring to root sources.

They removed a lot of complexity by doing that and I bet more than a few people didn't notice.