> We are already accustomed to R, Python, Node, Ruby, etc. building C stuff at package installation time. I don't have a great sense of where to draw the line, but somehow I feel the Julia convention crosses it.
I'm definitely not accustomed to this, and absolutely hate this behavior. Very frequently installing a dependent package or compiling one via one of these package managers is frequently a good way to build it badly, without respecting compiler flags, ignoring system paths, and so on. It's also hard to customize or force the usage of a shared system library which has been built for the purpose.
Ask the package managers of any linux distro how annoying is to handle unbundling in these scenarios.
Last time I checked, installing some of the tidyverse packages from CRAN resulted in other packages being directly cloned from github and installed in the process. That sort of behavior really shouldn’t be allowed.
R packages on CRAN need to be able to install without internet connection so I'm skeptical that that's the case. CRAN packages also don't allow for dependency on R packages that are (only) on github.
I’ll try to look up details, but I’m fairly confident. I discovered it because I was installing packages on a server which was firewalled, and had the CRAN repository proxied.
I'm definitely not accustomed to this, and absolutely hate this behavior. Very frequently installing a dependent package or compiling one via one of these package managers is frequently a good way to build it badly, without respecting compiler flags, ignoring system paths, and so on. It's also hard to customize or force the usage of a shared system library which has been built for the purpose.
Ask the package managers of any linux distro how annoying is to handle unbundling in these scenarios.
pip too.