What is hurting my brain?

packages
1

I’m new to Meteor and so far things have been working really nicely. But when it comes to Atmosphere I feel a bit lost.

Here’s a scenario that has just happened to me.

I come across some packages on Atmosphere:

https://atmospherejs.com/angularui/ui-select (installs ui-select version 0.12)
https://atmospherejs.com/rgnevashev/angular-ui-select (installs ui-select version 0.13.2)

These two Atmosphere “wrapper” packages wrap the same underlying angular library:

So why does my brain hurt?

  1. Why are there two seemingly identical packages?

  2. The more “official” looking package, seemingly created by the angular ui team, is out of date but I can’t really figure out where/how to nicely ask them to update it.

  3. It was kind of hard to search for only “Angular-related Meteor third-party libraries”. Even that phrase is breaking my brain.

  4. As far as I can tell, the “Meteor” versions of third-party libraries don’t actually exist anywhere (such as github), do they? And if they do exist, what do they contain exactly?

  5. Why does there need to be Meteor versions of Angular libraries anyway? Couldn’t there be a more direct/transparent way to install Angular modules (in other words make automatically available every module found on http://ngmodules.org/, for example.

Apologies if these are stupid questions, I just couldn’t find answers on Google that satisfied my curiosity or cleared up my confusion.

2

Meteor did not support NPM until Meteor 1.3 (still in beta btw). So to get around that people created wrapper packages.

With Meteor 1.3, NPM will be a first-class citizen so you’ll be able to access that smorgasbord of libs straight from the horses mouth. No more flimsy wrapper packages that need to be updated. Hope that clarifies things for you.

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3

So all this confusing stuff is going away? That would really make my day!

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4

Eventually yeah. There are still going to be Meteor packages of course, but expect ‘wrapper’ type packages to no longer exist or be maintained. And that’s good right? It makes no sense to keep these wrappers since NPM is going to be supported fully.

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