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From: imsop.php@rwec.co.uk ("Rowan Tommins [IMSoP]")



On 29 June 2024 21:20:23 BST, Michael Morris <tendoaki@gmail=2Ecom> wrote:

>Composer is wonderful as a userland solution to a problem the Internals
>team has failed to solve, but such a critical problem as package
>management being mostly solved in userland

I don't think anyone failed to solve anything=2E Somebody came along and b=
uilt a solution, it worked well, and people adopted it=2E In fact, so many =
people adopted it that we're in the happy place of not having competing too=
ls, outside of application-specific plugin installers=2E=20

Its release cycle is independent of PHP's, which means you can get the lat=
est version of Composer whatever version of PHP you're on=2E It's written i=
n PHP at least in part because there are a lot more PHP programmers willing=
 to maintain PHP tools than there are C programmers willing to maintain PHP=
 tools=2E

If Composer (or some new package manager) was marked as an official part o=
f the PHP project, I doubt it would make any difference to how people find =
it - users looking at existing projects find it because it's the first line=
 of the installation instructions;  new PHP users learning from scratch are=
 probably following tutorials the official project has no control over, whi=
ch either mention it or not=2E


> using a configuration file
>(composer=2Ejson) written in another programming language

JSON is not a programming language=2E It looks a bit like JS, because it w=
as invented by a JS developer, but was explicitly designed as a cross-langu=
age data format=2E=20

Some other package managers use other data formats, like XML, or TOML=2E T=
here probably are languages which use their own source code for that config=
uration, but I've not come across any=2E


As I mentioned on another reply, it would take an extremely good sales pit=
ch for me to pay any attention to any attempt at a replacement for Composer=
, especially one that wasn't compatible with its huge library of existing p=
ackages=2E=20

If the sales pitch is "JSON is not the best format for package configurati=
on", count me out=2E=20


The same goes for a lot of other suggestions in this thread: I'm going to =
need a pretty strong sales pitch to change my hierarchical namespaces to fl=
at module imports - and more importantly, projects like Symfony and Laravel=
 are going to need that sales pitch, before they break compatibility for th=
ousands of applications built on their current packages=2E


Other parts of this thread are just random rants about things people don't=
 like in PHP, which I have zero interest in, and have nothing whatsoever to=
 do with modules or package management=2E


Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]