ability to alias dependencies in component.json

[andrewrk]

This would save you from having to use if statements to check for the window object and save people from making repositories like https://github.com/juliangruber/events which simply wraps the component/events component and names it identically to the node one.

For example this would solve component/inherit#2

[juliangruber]

What exactly do you propose?

[andrewrk]

Option 1. You could optionally supply an object instead of a string to a dependency:

{
  "dependencies": {
    "juliangruber/events": {version: "*", alias: "foo-events"}
    "component/inherit": "*"
  }
}

In this example, require('events') would not work, but require('foo-events') would work.

Option 2. Explicitly list aliases.

{
  "dependencies": {
    "juliangruber/events": {version: "*", alias: "foo-events"}
    "component/inherit": "*"
  },
  "dependencyAliases": {
    "foo-events": "juliangruber/events"
  }
}

In this example, require('events') and require('foo-events') would both work.

[avetisk]

In this example, require('events') would not work, but require('events') would work.

Something's wrong here.

[andrewrk]

Oops. Edited.

[tj]

-1 from me, I still want to pretend node doesn't exist. We've also been annoyed by -component in npm, but there's no reason we should be tweaking components to fix npm's fault. a try/catch works fine though it is ugly. Recent npm supports name/proj as deps though BTW that might help a bit

[andrewrk]

component already solves 95% of the problem of creating components that work both in node.js and component. Can't we gently push it the rest of the way?

[tj]

it doesn't have anything to do with node, npm's namespacing issue is its own deal, we need to keep things focused