bolinfest
commented
4 months ago I think a contributor "just has to install it" as they would for something like make.
Any solution I can think of adds some layer of redirection that sacrifices the "run the underlying executable as transparently as possible" that is core to DotSlash:
https://dotslash-cli.com/docs/execution/
Now that DotSlash is open source, hopefully we can get included in the standard package managers, which should at least make the overhead of installing it considerably lower.
abhinav
Hello! Congrats on open sourcing the project. I just discovered it, and I have a question around best practices with bootstrapping.
From my point of view, dotslash helps make a monorepo (or even a regular repo) more self-contained: commit dependency executable scripts to the repository, and let dotslash manage them. However, there's still one issue: you have to have dotslash installed to get the rest.
I'm starting this issue to discuss that: How could a repository bootstrap dotslash so that it can use it, without having every contributor install it.
"That's a minimum requirement" is a completely valid position here. Feel free to close the issue if that's the case.
An alternative that I can see this working is to use a shell script to bootstrap (similar to pantsw, buckw, bazelisk): Provide a script that will download or build a specific version of dotslash, and cache it somewhere. Basically a lightweight version of dotslash's own functionality. (This is also close to the approach used by a similar tool, Hermit FWIW.)
I'm curious about the maintainers' thoughts about what their preferred approach would be here.