Principles for Successful Package Management

A couple of months ago I shared some tips & tricks to help you prevent ending up in NuGet dependency hell. As a big fan of the SOLID principles, I’ve always wondered why nobody thought of applying these principles on the package level. If SOLID can help you to build cohesive, loosely coupled components which do one thing only and do that well, why can’t we do the same thing on the package level. As it happens, my colleague Jonne enthousiastically referred me to the book Principles of Package Design by Matthias Noback. It’s available from Leanpub and does exactly that, offering a couple of well-named guidelines inspired by SOLID that will help you design better NuGet, NPM or whatever your package management solution of choice uses.

The first half of the 268 pages provide an excellent refresh of the SOLID principles. He even does a decent job of explaining the inversion of control principle (although I would still refer to the original to really grasp that often misunderstood principle). After that he carefully dives into the subtleties of cohesion as a guiding principles before he commences on the actual package design principles. The examples are all in PHP (yeah, really), but the author clearly explains how these would apply to other platforms. Notice that this post is mostly an exercise for me to see if I got the principles right, so I would highly recommend buying…