npm VS rbenv

The fact that JSON doesn't support comments is so annoying, and I always thought that Douglas Crockford's rationale for this basically made no sense ("They can be misused!" - like, so what, nearly anything can be misused. So without support for comments e.g. in package.json files I have to do even worse hacky workaround bullshit like "__some_field_comment": "this is my comment"). There is of course jsonc and JSON5 but the fact that it's not supported everywhere means 10 years later we still can't write comments in package.json (there is https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/4482 and about a million related issues).

Things like the sparkline charts on npmjs (e.g. https://www.npmjs.com/package/npm ) are interactive SVGs. I think they're pretty common for data visualizations of all kinds

I actually did a POC 7 years ago about this - https://github.com/tanepiper/steal-ur-stuff

It was reported to npm at the time, but they chose to ignore it - https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/17724

Every time this pops up, I'm reminded of the day that the NPM registry started returning 418 responses.

I remember being at a training course that day and my manager asking me what we could do to fix it because our CI was failing to pull dependencies from NPM.

Trying to explain that NPM was returning a status code intended as an April Fools joke and which was never meant to see the light of production was quite difficult

https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/20791

I should really get around to how I discovered this 6 years ago and still nothing done about it

Whenever something like this comes up I usually have to tap the sign (and the original report)

NPM is not "Node Package Manager". https://www.npmjs.com/package/npm

> which can be overriden with env setting

Support for this is not great. Lots of packages still don't support this properly. My experience matches the 2015 comment https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/775#issuecomment-71294085

> Not sure why "symlinks" would be involved.

If you make your node_modules a symlink, multiple packages will fail. Even if you're not interested in doing that, others are.

> What NPM does is leaps and bounds ahead

Unless you change your node / gyp version. It doesn't really have a concept of runtime version. You can restrict it, but not have two concurrent versions if they conflict.

[email protected] was released in May 2017 and it seems to address many of the issues that Yarn aims to solve. Do keep an eye on it!

I think it's had been supposed to do that since forever. Apart from some bug in npm 5.3. Are you sure your package-lock versions actually conform to the semver ranges in your package.json?

When I was technical blogging on how to learn from open-source code [1], I used it quite frequently to get unstuck and/or to figure out how to tease apart a large question into multiple smaller functions. For example, I had no idea how to break up this long `sed` command [2] into its constituent parts, so I plugged it into ChatGPT and asked it to break down the code for me. I then Googled the different parts to confirm that ChatGPT wasn't leading me astray.

If I had asked StackOverflow the same question, it would have been quickly closed as being not broadly applicable enough (since this `sed` command is quite specific to its use case). After ChatGPT broke the code apart for me, I was able to ask StackOverflow a series of more discrete, more broadly-applicable questions and get a human answer.

TL;DR- I quite like ChatGPT as a search engine when "you don't know what you don't know", and getting unblocked means being pointed in the right direction.

1. https://www.richie.codes/shell

2. https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv/blob/e8b7a27ee67a5751b899215b...

Let’s get started. I prefer to manage my Ruby installations on my development machine with chruby paired with ruby-install. Another outstanding set of tools is rbenv with ruby-build. I highly recommend installing Ruby with one of those two sets of tools. Follow the instructions on their project’s READMEs. For this article, I’ll be running Ruby (MRI) v3.3.0.

By setting up your environment in isolation, you can prevent yourself from a lot of issues when experimenting with code. It makes your code behave more predictable due to the defined state of the runtime environment you are working with. This article should provide you with enough information to get started, but obviously, there is a lot more power embedded in NVM, Virtual Environment and RBEnv. So make sure to check their documentation.

There is this good resource that also talk about different ruby version manager from the Rbenv repository. With some links to benchmarks of ASDF and Rbenv.

rbenv (my personal favorite)

One suggestion would be to setup your install based on a development environment using git and a Ruby version manager like rvm or rbenv to allows you to setup a user controlled gemset and execution path.

rbenv for Ruby

git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv

On MacOS, I haven't had a problem with character encodings in the terminal in ruby for a while, but used to. When I used to, it had to do with how ruby had been installed, in particular that it needed to be compiled linking against an appropriate readline library. Are you trying to use the ruby that came with debian? You might have more luck installing ruby yourself, and using a ruby version manager. rbenv might be the simplest for you.

For my local machine, I use RVM (head). Other options are rbenv and asdf.