npm, PyPi overtake CPAN

[Edmund von der Burg]

CPAN is excellent for its uniformity. The names of modules are predictable,
the documentation is consistently presented, the search good, publishing
fairly straightforward and installing trivial.

pypi (I find) is appalling. Names are all over the place, searching bad,
docs ugly, installing reasonable-ish, publishing confusing and then
unsatisfying.

NPM is overwhelmingly superb with regards to publishing. The steps to
publish are extensions to the steps to creating the module in the first
place so it is very little extra work. And once published the modules are
instantly available (no waiting on mirror syncing) so you can publish and
then install as a way to work - which really encourages publishing smaller
bits of code. The docs are also good as the convention is becoming a
README.md that explains most of it, and a separate site for the details if
required.

Both pypi and npm allow you to install from repo urls, which is most handy.
I'm not sure if cpan can do this, although I guess there is no reason why
not.

NPM is great, I believe, because it is the youngest and has cherry picked
the best bits from the others.

Can't comment on Ruby.


Cheers,
  Edmundp



On 24 May 2013 07:30, James Laver <james.laver at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 24 May 2013, at 01:31, Paul Makepeace <paulm at paulm.com> wrote:
>
> > I'm sure there's plenty of caveats etc but the gradients is probably
> what's
> > most interesting here; CPAN is relatively static compared with, well, all
> > the others.
>
> How about the caveat of utility? Whilst npm has a reasonable SNR and gems
> has so many modules that there are enough useful ones hidden there, pypi is
> mostly full of crap and not useful when you want to achieve something.
>
> That said, egg basket makes it remarkably easy to host your own mini-pypi
> server for darkpan you've generated
>