Cyclic dependencies in bower config

[kavika13]

I'm new to bower and to Polymer, so apologies if this is wrong/boneheaded :)

• Polymer/polymer depends on Polymer/core-component-page
• Polymer/core-component-page depends on Polymer/polymer

Does this seem like a cyclic dependency, and should it be fixed?

I found this problem when trying to use http://brunch.io. I got a stack overflow (brunch/node_modules/read-components/index.js:0 RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded) after including Polymer.

I fixed it by breaking the dependency using the overrides feature to set core-component-page's dependencies to remove Polymer/polymer. Here's what my overrides ended up looking like after addressing all the problems I found:

"overrides": {
  "polymer": {
    "main": "polymer.html",
    "dependencies": {}
  },
  "core-component-page": { "main": "core-component-page.html" }
}

[ebidel]

Bower fixed this a while back:bower/bower#1104. I want to say it was around 1.3. Make sure you're using the latest version of Bower.

[kavika13]

I want to be clear that it isn't bower that is the problem - bower is working fine for me, as it "does the right thing" for cycles. It is fine for bower to do this, since all it is doing is downloading the packages, it isn't trying to concatenate them, etc.

Using web compiler tools that are bower enabled is the problem, when they have a build-order dependency enumerator that is vulnerable to cycles. The enumerator/compiler in http://brunch.io breaks on cyclic dependencies, for example.

There are a lot of other things the brunch.io compiler is vulnerable to, as well, such as missing "main" lists, but that's possibly a separate bug :)

See the rationale presented for the "overrides" feature - bower/bower#585 - more or less, they bowed out on enforcing strictly clean packages since some of their package maintainers were not likely to support bower unless it supported extremely lazy (unusable for build tools) package maintenance. Also see - bower/spec#27

[kavika13]

Also note, I found this just now - https://www.polymer-project.org/articles/concatenating-web-components.html

It looks like if I want full build support from brunch.io I may have some extensions to write and bugs to work around :) I still think some fixes to improve the thoroughness/absolute correctness of polymer's bower manifests would help though.

[tjsavage]

Closing this issue due to age and the release of version 1 of Polymer - please feel free to re-open if this is incorrect.