Hey guys,

I know, I'm not the first and maybe also not the last one... but here it is,
a package manager for OpenSCAD. A Quickstart is described under the
following link...  https://github.com/RobertFach/Openscad-Modules
https://github.com/RobertFach/Openscad-Modules

I didn't wanted to reinvent the wheel, that's why I studied already
available package managers. Well, after trying out several of these, I
decided to give NPM.js, the NODE.js package manager a more decent try. The
advantage of reusing an already existing package manager is obvious, they
are well  established, work flawlessly on a couple of platforms, have a good
documentation, broad acceptance and large communities behind.

Also, with NPM.js, it's also possible to specify dependencies to a registry
and at the same time to private git repositories. Each dependency (including
the project itself) has a semantic version, which can be used to reason
about compatible dependency versions. This all is amazing when building up
complex projects.

Okay, right now, I work on some examples and already released some modules
in the registry itself. For those of you, already familiar with publishing
own modules in NPM.js can do this already. This means the registry is free
for all and without any restrictive control. Others should wait for the
documentations... Anyway, just feel free to try it out, give feedback,
comments, drawbacks, improvements... For me, its just an idea I wanted to
try out and share with you.

Cheers, Mindfab aka Robert

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Sent from: http://forum.openscad.org/

My documention is not yet complete. However, I think NPM is a pretty good
choice when combined with some rules.

I'm working on a more complex example, where one can see how NPM and
OpenSCAD can deal with the following problems:

• Namespaces, I'm simulating the namespace by doing the following "trick". I
  include the dependencies inside a the package module. It looks like:

module stepper_mount(<parameters>) {
include <node_modules/stepper/stepper.scad>
include <node_modules/screws/screws.scad>

module do_something_useful() {
call_fn_from_stepper_scad();
...
call_fn_from_screw_scad();
}

do_something_useful();
}

This simulates a namespace and works perfect with npm. It also has another
advantage which is nested dependencies. That means your modules can require
dependencies in different versions. NPM takes care of all of this.

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You are right, this is a serious problem, but it can be dealt with. Right
now, I don't see it to serious, but the registry can be tuned in the way
that published versions cannot be deleted. This will be anyway a good
choice, because in semantic versioning (I think this is what you are
refering to by archived versioning) a published version should never be
changed. I'm not 100% sure how its implemented in the registry that I is
currently used.

Therefore, I 100% agree. Maybe you can fill out an issue in Github.

Thx,

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Thx for your feedback.

Publishing is pretty straight forward. If you are already familiar with NPM
you can do this already. Otherwise, just give me some time to complete the
more complex examples. In principle it works like that. You register or
login to the registry by choosing a username/password combination. Once you
are logged in, you can publish packages if you are the owner of a package or
if its a new package. Packages are identified by the "name" and "version"
fields.

Right now its not possible to use libraries from thingiverse. I also think
that it would be better to motivate the thingiverse library authors to move
to the package manager or at least use github as a repository. With NPM it's
already possible to use github as a package source. Using Thingiverse as a
source would require to modify NPM itself, this I would like to avoid. (NPM
supports tarballs over http - but this would only help with a small
percentage of the libraries on thingiverse).

My roadline was as follows:

1. Completing the documention and more examples
2. Asking thingiverse and github OpenSCAD library authors to add their
   libraries to the registry
3. Move some libraries, where the authors did not respond, to the registry
   by cloning them on github and adding a package.json file.
4. Iterating through 1,2,3,4

What do you mean by fetching semi-random dependencies?

My personal workflow already changed a lot. Beforehand I few repositories
with a couple of modules in different versions. Now, I have a lot of
repositories where my modules are stored in different versions. A new
project is always started as a new repository and with a package.json file
refering to the required dependencies. This way, my projects can always
reuse artifacts/modules from other projects and its pretty easy to increase
complexity by requiring already existing modules/projects.

I think things will be more clear with more examples. Meanwhile, just have a
look at NPM.js to get a feeling of what is possible.

Cheers, Robert

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Sent from: http://forum.openscad.org/

I have come across this thread after having an idea to use npm to manage
packages for OpenSCAD :) I already use NPM to store some NodeJS modules and
feel that OpenSCAD is missing such central modules repo. I am going to give
it a try and publish some modules I use in my projects. Can I somehow
register?

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Sent from: http://forum.openscad.org/

Also, good module repository support might require better build logic
integration in OpenSCAD itself.

With NodeJS when you have project dir project1 and run
npm install some_module

inside, the module copy comes from central repository to
project1/node_modules/some_module

So whe I import some_module from JavaScript source file by name like:
require ('some_module');

NodeJS runtime would search ./node_modules/some_module to resolve this
dependency (even more, if it doest not find requested module in project dir
./node_modules, it would go one level up to ../node_modules, then one more
level up to ../../node_modules etc - so with this mecanics some module deps
can be shared among multiple projects).

This logic should be implemented on the level of build/runtime tool (NodeJS
or OpenSCAD), not on the level of package manager.

Of course one cane import module like
require ('./node_modules/some_module');

But this would not be so elegant.

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