chvanikoff
Mix deps.add functionality
Never thought I’ll ever compare Node and Elixir, but here I go…
Why don’t we have something similar to npm i(nstall) --save dependency@version with Mix? All the Node-world libraries have step 1 of the installation guide “run npm i --save this_lib@1.2.3” while all the Elixir-world libraries have step 1 "open mix.exs and add a dependency to the list of your dependencies like {this_lib, "~> 1.2.3"}. It can be better in terms of versions micro-management, name-collisions etc., but isn’t it all the same for npm? I think it would be really nice to have something like mix deps.add the_lib and I’m really not getting why don’t we have it so far.
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jeramyRR
Honestly, I think because really the time it takes to add it to mix.exs and to run mix deps.get is trivial. As developers laziness can be a good thing, but sometimes doing two steps instead of one isn’t that big of a deal. You could implement this on your own via a bash script using sed, but is it worth your time to automate this one step?
wmnnd
It’s a bit more complicated with mix.exs because unlike node’s package.json it’s not a structured file format (i. e. XML or JSON) which makes parsing and modifying it much harder.
Not only that, but It doesn’t even necessarily follow the same patterns for each project. While it is common to have a private deps/0 function as part of a MyApp.Mixfile module, one could decide to go about things in a completely different way.
chvanikoff
Sure truth, but I think if we had a mix deps.add for the very basic Elixir app with a single deps/0 function in mix.exs, that would be great.
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