Add simple distribution mechanism about box HOT 10 OPEN

How should this be compartmentalised?

Should this be a core part of “modules”? I’m somewhat in favour of keeping it as a separate project. If so, would it be an independent package? Or a module? The latter has property of some kind of bootstrapping, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage:

It’s a disadvantage because installing it would require some manual work (since it cannot install itself the first time). On the flip side, it could take care of updating itself, by harnessing its own mechanism for module distribution.

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I think the module manager can be a module. For easier installation you can also build native installers for it e.g. a DEB package for ubuntu, a DMG for OSX, etc. At least this is how it is done on other platforms, and that works well, imho.

Btw. it would be great if modules could handle command line execution (from the shell I mean) somehow, and then the module manager could be also run like that:

$ mod install module1

Or is this already solved?

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It’s not solved already (none of this code is written yet) but I intended to implement this, yes.

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No, I mean, is "running" modules from the shell already solved? Did you have something similar to Python's if __name__ == "__main__": idiom, or am I misremembering?

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Ah, yes, that’s implemented. In fact, I’m working on a convenience wrapper (already using it internally), which allows the following code:

sys = modules::import('sys')

sys$run({
    sys$print('Hello, world!')
})

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For reference, relevant comment discussion about post-install hooks (to install the module manager script) here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/32035219/1968

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Name clashes in public modules will be a concern.

For reference, here’s a Google search on the subject: https://www.google.com/search?q=avoiding+package+name+clashes — showing that this is an active concern across languages and libraries. Java/Swift/Go/… have all solved this, while NPM has fallen on its face, despite their best efforts. This needs to be a central concern of any distribution system for modules.

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Could just have a Github organisation as a "reference list"? That way they would be indexed, connected, and have unique names.

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• Con: Github is a third party private corporation. Worst-case scenario, they go out of business tomorrow. Or they are made irrelevant by an emergent competitor.
• Pro: Cons are unlikely; apps have already done the same with Twitter handles, and it worked well (until Twitter decided to make handles modifiable).

So yes, at least informally that’ll probably be the case.

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Github doesn't own the content, would be easily transferable. Combined with the unlikelyness of that happening, this is a very minor risk.

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