Standalone Release File

Davis

protosam poor workaround solution

Composer is not a poor workaround solution, it's not even a workaround. What exactly is it working around? It makes working with a production and a beta server easy with composer.lock. It is a common tool used in php development. Also, it makes installing extensions possible in the admin control panel. Php cannot install apt packages. And do you expect extension authors to have packages on all the major distros? That's ridiculous. Those package managers are meant for packages that affect the system. Composer is meant for packages that affect the software.

protosam which is poor practice

Who told you that was poor practice?

jordanjay29

protosam Thanks for your feedback. It just so happens that our developer Franz is working on a web installer that makes it possible to install Flarum from a php file. We definitely agree that this is the simplest and most accessible route.

As far as composer goes, like Davis mentions, it's a useful manager for php dependencies. Being cross platform is another bonus. It really does help to ensure that Flarum and its dependencies are up to date without overcomplicating the process, that ability is just a composer update away.

I hope you can understand why we chose composer to help with Flarum's packages, and will stick with us until we have a Web interface for installing and upgrading. We do want to make Flarum user friendly, it's just during this beta period that it makes more sense to use composer directly rather than to distribute zip files or roll our own package manager.

Davis

protosam If it's not composer dependent, that's great.

Flarum will and probably always be composer dependant. In case you dont know exactly what composer is, it's a php dependancy manager. The thing that makes this important is it can be run inside of php. Making an installer "without composer", when truly composer is still there. You just don't have to run the commands in ssh. It will probably be as simple as wget'ing, git cloning, or ftp'ing the base package and running a php document through the browser to install. The reason we use composer is not to "bypass" the distro's package manager but to enable us to install packages through php (something that is not posible with the machine's package manager). Also, it makes it easier to develop because you can fetch the dev-master branch from the github simply by changing a few values in the composer.json.

jordanjay29

protosam If it's not composer dependent, that's great.

Sort of. Flarum is developing a method to run composer via php (rather than terminal) which will clean up a lot of the accessibility problems. Other future methods include setting up our own packagist repository (that will help with memory issues) and other optimizations to keep the system simple and lightweight for our users. It won't remove composer entirely, but it will relegate it to the background and try to integrate it as much as possible rather than treating it, as you put it, like a black box.