DavidIQ wrote:This would obviously not be a requirement for when we go Alpha or Beta or Final. Only for development. I think what IKD did by providing the files could/should be something the development team regularly provides for a stock development build even if it's in a link somewhere on here.
Correct; the
vendor/
folder, populated with all required dependencies at the time of release, will be provided in the final released build. It would probably be a good idea to have an automatic build generated for each push to develop so that a fully-installable package is available at any given time without requiring command prompt. However, for someone wanting to develop with an altered set of dependencies, they would still need to alter the composer file and run the update script.
DavidIQ wrote:Expecting contributors to go through this whole command prompt business is expecting a bit much for some especially if it's something as trivial as a template or css change for instance.
Well, as long as they have the vendor folder for the latest commit on develop (which should not change until a change is made to composer.json), they don't need to even worry about composer when making any change that does not alter the set of required dependencies.
If you can suggest a better way to include our required dependencies, short of us having to develop all of the systems we use (i.e. Events-related classes, DependencyInjection service container, et al), which would be a complete waste of time, then please share. As the saying goes (or something to this effect), Good developers write code for themselves; great developers borrow code from others.
In short, Composer allows us to specify packages we need, down to specific versions, and it helps us keep up to date with said dependencies automatically, without having to manually keep track of which ones have been updated and then overwrite that dependency in our repository with the updated files. It is unfortunate that there is apparently either some downtime on the packagist and/or composer website(s) or else some configuration issue that is keeping some people from being able to utilize it, but at this point, it's the best we have. If this means I have to periodically provide a vendor folder for people as our dependencies are updated, then that's what I'll do.