> 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?
> 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'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.
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?