Should Bower tools use .bower.json rather than bower.json?

[donaldpipowitch]

Or: Should I ignore the bower.json?

It seems .bower.json is always generated if I install a Bower package, so I ignore my bower.json in some of my packages. (It seems bad to duplicate this data - unnecessarily ?)  This obviously breaks tools which rely only on bower.json.

Should Bower tools depend solely on bower.json or should they at least depend on .bower.json? (E.g. should I make a pull request for such tools? :))

[sheerun]

@sindresorhus ?

[sindresorhus]

I agree. That's confusing and unnecessary. Could probably do it like npm and just have .bower.json as bower.json. Though not sure about the reasoning behind the current way.

[benschwarz]

I have no idea why both are used.

[sheerun]

Do they always have the same format? (I see .bower.json has some additional info).

[satazor]

.bower.json is a clone of bower.json with additional properties used internally. The reasioning behind it was not to modify the original fil so that people are not induced in error

[stephenplusplus]

@donaldpipowitch didn't you have a case where information wasn't copied over to .bower.json?

[sheerun]

Also for non-registry packages there will be .bower.json, but no bower.json (in cache too).

[sindresorhus]

@satazor i don't see the problem with modifying the bower.json file. npm does it without problems.

[satazor]

There might be problems, for instance, bower corrects the 'version' property if it mismatches the tag in git. That could cause confusion if users would inspect bower.json and see different results compared to its remote counterpart.

[sheerun]

Shouldn't bwerr fix _release part of .bower.json, not version?

[satazor]

_release is not the same as version, they are different things internally. It just happens that sometimes they are the same, but not always.

[sheerun]

I think it's not that much of surprise that version has been corrected. I'd be more surprised that file contains new keys, but that could be documented behavior. I'm on no side though.

Also, users are not confused that ignored files are removed from component dir? :)

I think users are confused by both .bower.json and bower.json.

[donaldpipowitch]

Hi @stephenplusplus, no, .bower.json always worked fine for me. I only had problems with build tools which relied solely on bower.json, but not .bower.json, because I ignored out my bower.json.

[nicksrandall]

@sheerun you mentioned
Also for non-registry packages there will be .bower.json, but no bower.json (in cache too).
Why is that? I've also noticed that the .bower.json file for non registry items doesn't include the dependencies part of the bower.json file.

[sheerun]

Currently .bower.json is generated by bower for all dependencies, regardless their source.

I don't think it's something we want to change. Do you have any problems with it?

[sheerun]

So yeah. The ultimate answer is: use .bower.json.

If you have any issues with it, please open new issue :)