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Comment by mschuetz | Hacker News Reader

Every separate package adds overhead and another maintainer that you've got to put your trust in. I'd rather have few packages of well trusted maintainers instead of a thousand packages from god knows who.

Personally, I've made it a habit to not add anything that requires trivial one liner garbage packages, which amounts to not installing any dependency that uses anything from Jon Schlinkert (so no Webpack). Unfortunately I'm stuck with gulp right now but with the next major rewrite, I'll also get rid of gulp and its 300 dependencies.

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> I'd rather have few packages of well trusted maintainers instead of a thousand packages from god knows who.

Then the problem is the fact anybody can submit a package, not small packages.

Linux distributions solve this problem by having dedicated maintainers. Users of a distribution trust its maintainers when they use it. Software developers want the complete opposite: language-specific packages, instant and unrestricted package publication, containers, etc. Nobody wants to have to talk to a maintainer in order to get their software included in a distribution. Of course the result ends up being a mess.

What if Node's maintainers decided to distribute a curated set of packages alongside Node itself? The size of each individual package wouldn't really matter.

> What if Node's maintainers decided to distribute a curated set of packages alongside Node itself?

First, front-end has nothing to do with Node. Secondly, let’s say there’s some sort of front-end foundation who decides to provide a curated set of packages. A natural candidate would be create-react-app, which pulls over a thousand dependencies. That’s just one package you want to include. How the hell do you even start to curate such a beast?

> First, front-end has nothing to do with Node.

It was just an example.

> A natural candidate would be create-react-app, which pulls over a thousand dependencies. That’s just one package you want to include. How the hell do you even start to curate such a beast?

I don't know. How did Linux distributions do it? Arch Linux has over 10 thousand packages. Debian has over 50 thousand packages. Maybe people should ask the maintainers.

Point to me one package in Debian that depends on thousands more.

Oh and I was a maintainer for a major package manager back in the day for crying out loud (was responsible for overseeing the general health of the project as well as directly responsible for maybe a couple dozen individual packages). Never seen this kind of madness.

I don't know about Debian but Arch Linux has huge package groups and metapackages.

https://www.archlinux.org/groups/x86_64/kde-applications/

https://www.archlinux.org/groups/x86_64/pro-audio/

The Arch Wiki recommends the use of these huge packages. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't scale to a thousand packages or more.

I'm talking about one actual package that largely runs in a single process (or at least a single process group) with thousands of deps, not some sort of loosely related by category or by using the same framework (hell, we're talking about the framework itself here) package group where failure of one no name package doesn't affect anything else.

Groups are very different from dependencies. And a big meta-package is there for user convenience to get a bunch of stuff. It's almost never going to be depended on; if something needs a package or two from the group it will depend on that directly.

Have you considered using Rollup? I've personally found it delightful.

Already using rollup as a replacement for Webpack, but it seems to lag behind from time to time. Couldn't use certain new javascript features right away since it would throw an error.

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