Comparison of Package Managers.md

Hi Rick,

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I discussed the same argument with Ankit Aggarwal, and here are my counter-arguments:

• It seems to me like the survey should take into account the developer population using each tool. If we are doing such a survey to see what tool a programmer coming to Swift is coming from, there is much less chance he has previous knowledge of rebar3 than of npm. The majority of the ones which are widely used seem to use install: I’ve updated the survey bellow by ordering them by stars on GitHub. It’s a crude approximation of developer population, but I think it’s good enough for us.
• If we do end up implementing install to mean install to the system, how would we update the system packages?
  • Solution 1 would be to add a —system/—global flag on update. In that case, that would bring inconsistency by using two different commands to “install/resolve” and one command but different flags for updating.
  • Solution 2 would be to introduce a different command to update, for example upgrade. In that case, we get into the scenario of Homebrew, where two synonymous commands (update and upgrade) are used to do two different things (I have a hard time remembering which is which).

As can be seen in the table bellow, all package managers which offer both an installation for the local project and for the system always use the same commands names for both. I would vote for a system where:

• install [package]: resolves and fetches one or all packages locally in the project
• install —system package: fetches and installs a specific package in the system
• update [package]: resolves and updates one or all packages locally in the project
• update —system package: updates a specific package in the system

Here is the same survey you did, but with more information:

Package Manager	GitHub Stars	Language	Resolved File Name	Local Install Command	Local Update Command	System Install Command	System Update Command
Yarn	24711	JS	yarn.lock	install	upgrade	global install	global upgrade
NPM	12214	JS	npm-shrinkwrap.json	install	update	install -g	update -g
CocoaPods	9328	ObjC/Swift	Podfile.lock	install	update	N/A	N/A
Carthage	9320	ObjC/Swift	Cartfile.resolved	bootstrap	update	N/A	N/A
Composer	9313	PHP	composer.lock	install	update	N/A	N/A
Glide	4349	Go	glide.lock	install	update	N/A	N/A
Bundler	3771	Ruby	Gemfile.lock	install	update	install (with gem)	update (with gem)
Pip	3555	Python	requirements.txt	N/A	N/A	install	install --upgrade
Cargo	2206	Rust	Cargo.lock	N/A	update	N/A	N/A
rebar3	622	Erlang	rebar.lock	get-deps	upgrade	N/A	N/A
Carton	393	Perl	carton.lock	install	update	N/A	N/A
Pub	40	Dart	pubspec.lock	get	upgrade	N/A	N/A
Meteor	N/A (1)	JS	versions	add	update	N/A	N/A
Mix	N/A (2)	Elixir	mix.lock	deps.get	deps.update	N/A	N/A

1. We only have the number of GitHub stars for the the whole Meteor project (37255) - so are not easily comparable with the stars for other package manager projects in the list.
2. We only have the number of GitHub stars for the the whole Elixir project (9928) - so are not easily comparable with the stars for other package manager projects in the list.