Dependency Management: Composer

[EXreaction]

Thanks David that worked.

I had sent an email to the author of composer Jordi Boggiano who was very helpful. Believe it has something to do with not having OpenSSL active.

This seems easier than trying to figure out how to get OpenSSL working within a windows (meh, not all of us are *nixers) cmd prompt, so thanks again.

I'm pretty sure I do not have OpenSSL enabled on any of my test machines and I've not had an issue.

[DavidIQ]

Yeah I don't have it either and hasn't been an issue. Might be something in the PHP setup (PHP.ini).

[RMcGirr83]

What is the purpose again of bundling composer if it refuses to work?

QFT!!

So I did a completely new install of xampp and did the update using composer.phar self-update. Now when running composer.phar install it just sits there doing absolutely nothing. Is this thing going to be included in 3.1 for admins to do to install their forum? If so someone either needs to slap the author of composer or use a different package manager (or whatever it's called). It has taken me about 6 hours of trying this and trying that and I can pretty well state for certainty that if a user of the phpBB software comes across this much trouble you will, more than likely, lose "customers" as no one likes to dick around with all this techno stuff and it shouldn't be this difficult in getting a farken bulletin board installed.

[EDIT]Well the window finally finished and low and behold...see below[/EDIT]

Untitled.png (58.47 KiB) Viewed 3903 times

Even https (which I assume means that I now have OpenSSL active) is failing even though the file is there

[DavidIQ]

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. 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.

[imkingdavid]

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.

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.

[MichaelC]

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. 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.

We've already said (a long time ago) that we'd like to do nightly builds, its just the architecture needs building. Anyone is welcome to have a look at it. I believe bantu was working on it last.

[EXreaction]

Perhaps the vendor/ should just be populated in the develop branch by someone manually (using composer to download the files, then pushing them to develop), or even automatically if that is possible.

As long as we include the script, anyone would be able to update at any time if they needed to themselves, otherwise they could just wait for someone to push updates when they happen.

[DavidIQ]

We've already said (a long time ago) that we'd like to do nightly builds, its just the architecture needs building. Anyone is welcome to have a look at it. I believe bantu was working on it last.

Yes but you'd still have the same problem if the site is unreachable and maybe at an even more catastrophic level where you can't check anything in (theoretically). I'm not saying that gated builds of this vendor directory is not a good idea but we should be ready should this problem become more common.

[MichaelC]

We've already said (a long time ago) that we'd like to do nightly builds, its just the architecture needs building. Anyone is welcome to have a look at it. I believe bantu was working on it last.

Yes but you'd still have the same problem if the site is unreachable and maybe at an even more catastrophic level where you can't check anything in (theoretically). I'm not saying that gated builds of this vendor directory is not a good idea but we should be ready should this problem become more common.

We have the same problems with github. Packagist has a higher uptime than github does at the moment.

[Arty]

I've tried running composer.phar on Windows in phpBB directory and ran into this problem:

Code: Select all

  - Installing symfony/config (v2.1.0-RC1)
    Downloading: connection...


  [Composer\Downloader\TransportException]
  The "http://nodeload.github.com/symfony/Config/zipball/v2.1.0-RC1" file could not be downloaded (HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found)