Bower is fucked

Or alternately, front end infrastructure is fucked.

I decided to port groundstation to use bower for it’s frontend assets this evening. Technically, the component in question is airship, but that’s irrelevant. I need to pull in bootstrap, jquery, backbone and a few other bits and pieces and:

  1. It’s a pain in the ass to stay up to date
  2. Having all that code vendored screws with all my metrics

So off to bower land I go!

Cool, I can create a bowerrc with the target directory, and a component.json with some dependencies and run bower install and….

bower error 1 not found

There were errors, here's a summary of them:
- 1 not found

What the fuck is this. Oh, right, I can’t pass an array of dependencies in, it has to be a hash of dependency => version pairs. Cool. Pretty obvious from the error message right?

So I fix that, and run bower install and…

There were errors, here's a summary of them:
- jquery ENOENT, lstat '/Users/richo/.bower/cache/jquery/cf68c4c4e7507c8d20fee7b5f26709d9/.git/tags.3799'

At this point I’m fucking positive they’re just dicking with me. I run the same thing with –debug

There were errors, here's a summary of them:
- jquery ENOENT, lstat '/Users/richo/.bower/cache/jquery/cf68c4c4e7507c8d20fee7b5f26709d9/.git/tags.3799'

Obviously. Then you should see my jaw put a three foot divot in the floor when I notice that all of these commands exited 0.

Through trial and error, I manage to get a bit further to see:

There were errors, here's a summary of them:
- jquery ENOENT, lstat '/Users/richo/.bower/cache/jquery/cf68c4c4e7507c8d20fee7b5f26709d9/.git/tags.22124'
- underscore Didn't get expected byte count
expect: 667648
actual: 847834

and then again my jaw meets floor when I notice that It’s installing these assets anyway.

I’ve already opened a Pull request for the most trivial of these issues but seriously.. come on guys. This isn’t cool.

Chances are significant I’m going to roll my own ghetto make(1) based setup, because at least it does what it says on the tin.

About richo

Flying, coffee, computer stuff.
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