[shadowmint]

yeah yeah, I read the previous post (http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2014/03/just-what-we...) too.

Maybe this time we can talk about how to meaningfully solve these problems instead of just fighting pointlessly about if old tools are so great should be used for everything.

Decentralized package management huh?

How would that work?

A way of specifying an ABI for a packages instead of a version number? A way to bundle all your dependencies into a local package to depend on and push changes from that dependency tree automatically to builds off of it, but only manually update the dependency list?

I'm all for it. Someone go build one.

[talex5]

"Decentralized package management huh? How would that work?"

http://0install.net/ does this (sad to see it wasn't mentioned in the article). Basically:

1. Use URIs rather than short names to identify packages.

2. Scope dependencies so different applications can see different versions of the same library where necessary.

Here's an OSNews article from 2007 about such things:

http://www.osnews.com/story/16956/Decentralised-Installation...

[mercurial]

> A way of specifying an ABI for a packages instead of a version number?

Technically impossible for many languages (have fun figuring out what it would look like in Perl...). And even when it's possible, it's not a guarantee: you can have a semantic change without an ABI change. Cargo, Rust's newfangled package manager, supposes semantic versioning, and I think it's a sane attitude.

[tel]

Stronger and stronger typing makes this ABI guarantee stronger and stronger. Dependent typing could package theorems about the properties of your interface and then ensure that all matches satisfy those properties. You'd like depend upon their theorems to prove things about your own program knowing that nothing can break.

[mercurial]

Yes, but something like Idris isn't mainstream. 99% of the languages out there don't allow you to express this kind of invariant.

[tel]

Certainly, but it's going to become more and more so. The right way to do an API is to expose your invariants. Some day that will be a thing—and the distributed problem will still be here.

[mercurial]

That or we will all have to write Javascript in Javascript :)

[mercurial]

That or we will all have to write Javascript in Javascript.