[tahoe-dev] help! how do I manage dependencies on JavaScript code?

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 10:00 AM, Chris Palmer <chris at noncombatant.org> wrote:
>
> Compare Tahoe-LAFS to the Tor project. Tor has many nice things in its
> ecosystem, but they are separate projects that work well together instead of
> all being build dependencies bundled into a single giant mega-project.

Can you be more specific? The only thing that I can think of off the
top of my head that is bundled into Tahoe-LAFS and could be unbundled
is the SFTP server, which is the thing that causes us to depend on
PyCrypto and pyasn1 packages. I don't think it is a good idea to make
SFTP support unbundled or optional though, since it the source code
for it is intertwined with all the other Tahoe-LAFS source code and
since it is really conceptually much like the HTTP server and the
command-line tool (in my mind at least). Also it was a very widely
requested feature from users (or actually FUSE support was a very
widely requested feature and you can set up FUSE by using sshfs with
the Tahoe-LAFS SFTP server).

We've decided to put off integrating Brian's new visualizer until
after 1.8.0, and when we do integrate it I hope we'll be able to work
out a way to make it painless so that people who don't want it aren't
inconvenienced by its existence. Help wanted! The Tahoe-LAFS
volunteers have quite a large collection of useful tasks to work on,
and packing up JS code in a safe, principled way is yet another one. I
appreciate and value feedback from users about their preferences and
ideas, but of course I appreciate patches, docs, measurements, and
code-reviews even more. :-)

As for the ecosystem of Tahoe-LAFS-related things, there are many, and
more appearing all the time:

http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/RelatedProjects

Someone who wanted to contribute a bit of time to the project could
update that wiki page to include the recently discovered
django-tahoestorage project and the Tahoe-LAFS Flume Sink.

Regards,

Zooko