Critique on design decisions · warg

I have discovered warg 2 days ago, so it may well be that I have no clue of what I'm talking about. Maybe you disagree with how I think it should work and that is completely fine, but I would like to hear why I'm wrong.

BTW, It should probably be explained in the readme how to find this chat. Not that I had a hard time finding this chat, just that I had to find it at all,

Packages should be built from source · Issue #235 · bytecodealliance/registry

There is a lot of verification done to make sure that a thing that is downloaded is definitely a thing that is uploaded, and that someone is allowed to upload something. This design takes inspirati...

Warg assumptions

Warg assumptions. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

Lann Martin (Dec 14 2023 at 13:42):

I think some of your concerns are addressed by the Wasm Component proposal. I'd highly recommend @Luke Wagner's talk (especially the first ~10 minutes) on that as context for Warg's design.

Calvin Prewitt (Dec 14 2023 at 16:01):

@Paul Scheduikat Thanks for writing up your thoughts. I'm happy to schedule a call to discuss and talk thru, if you'd like.

Paul Scheduikat (Dec 14 2023 at 16:19):

Paul Scheduikat (Dec 14 2023 at 16:21):

Robin Brown (Dec 14 2023 at 16:42):

I'd like to ask that you take a more open-minded approach and lead with questions about how/why things work and what responsibilities different parts of the systems take on before jumping to criticism.

Robin Brown (Dec 14 2023 at 16:43):

We're very open, there are many talks about what we're doing, our meetings are open to the public, and we're happy to chat with you.

Paul Scheduikat (Dec 14 2023 at 16:58):

@Robin Brown I'm completely open to my criticism being entirely invalid. I made conclusions from my very limited understanding of the warg project.
Sorry if this made you feel attacked.

I'm happy to learn more about why certain design decisions were taken, there is just very limited documentation in the repo.

Robin Brown (Dec 14 2023 at 16:59):

It's not so much about "feeling attacked" as just wanting to set a tone for a productive discussion. I think asking questions and learning more first is a better way to get things off on the right foot.

Robin Brown (Dec 14 2023 at 17:00):

If you still have the criticism after that point, then you'll have the context to make it precise and constructive; and if you don't have criticisms left, we don't have to debate them :smile:

Paul Scheduikat (Dec 14 2023 at 17:15):

Calvin Prewitt (Dec 14 2023 at 17:26):

In some ways, it is designed similar but in other ways it is quite different. Warg is aiming to provide a solution for both deployment artifacts (perhaps with OCI integration) as well as software libraries (like npm, crates, etc).

The docs for the project aren't that helpful, at the moment. Easier to talk thru and introduce the project.

Ralph (Dec 14 2023 at 19:00):

wait; warg is designed similar to a container registry? Boy, as one of the PMs for Azure Container Registry I'm blown away. :-) From my pov, it's not designed that way at all.......

Ralph (Dec 14 2023 at 19:01):

now note, the funniest thing about very abstract questions like that one is that it provokes thoughts like mine -- but there's no answer that doesn't involve why and how do you mean, precisely?

Ralph (Dec 14 2023 at 19:02):

for example, container registries are not federated in any way; but warg is designed to be. So, which part of "designed like a container registry" did you mean?

Ralph (Dec 14 2023 at 19:03):

What IS true is that, because of a LOT of hard work moving fast, the documentation doesn't fully capture what's been gone over to reach where we are. That's unfortunate, but chatting with @Calvin Prewitt first will help both you and possibly result in better documentation. :-)

Paul Scheduikat (Dec 14 2023 at 19:18):

@Ralph Talking to @Calvin Prewitt tomorrow, maybe that clears up some things for me.

Ralph (Dec 14 2023 at 20:19):

totes great. bring the details after ward back here! engineering is full of tradeoffs between objectives and resources. :-)

Calvin Prewitt (Dec 15 2023 at 17:20):

@Paul Scheduikat and I just finished chatting about Warg and Wasm Components. Good conversation introducing what Warg is and isn't. The docs will be a priority soon. Hope to have more conversations and get him involved.

Paul Scheduikat (Dec 15 2023 at 17:35):

I had a good conversation with @Calvin Prewitt, in which he explained the thinking behind warg in detail.

I now understand that most of my concerns are out of scope for warg. I thought warg was trying to be a complete package manager. I think most of my concerns should still be taken into account when implementing a package manager/ package distribution system on top of warg.

Stream: warg

Topic: Critique on design decisions

Paul Scheduikat (Dec 14 2023 at 01:52):