Multiple Versions on a System

[MehrdadKhnzd]

Hey there, and thanks for your great work!
I wonder if there's a built-in solution for having multiple versions of Deno on a single system. Honestly, I don't want to use stuff like nvm again. Is this feature currently available? Or will it be added to Deno?
Thanks!

[cdaringe]

not a maintainer, but i wouldn't bank on it :/. i'm needing nvm like functionality now too, but i am a big nvm fan :). looks like https://github.com/asdf-community/asdf-deno is goin

[crowlKats]

the most built-in way is switching deno version with deno upgrade --version <someversion>; tho that will replace the entire executable. i know it isnt the right solution, but it is the best built-in currently (warning: upgrade --version only works since 1.0.0-rc2)

[MehrdadKhnzd]

nvm is good, but it's not enough. It's not that easy and there are different nvms for Windows and Linux, and that's another problem. I think as this project aims to eliminate Node.js problems, it should consider this problem, too. An official, consistent way of handling this problem is way better and I think something like this would be really great:
deno@1.0.0-rc2 run ...
Now that we're in early stages, it's way easier to add these kinda features cause later it gets really harder. Is there any kind of plan for it? This would solve a lot of future pain in advance. :D

[kitsonk]

nvm is a seperate project to Node.js. A community solution to multiple versions of Deno is likely the right place to start something like this.

[Chathula]

+1 for this. When i first saw deno, i search for this. Only solution for this now is asdf. It is good to have some kind of version management inbuilt with deno.

I am a big fan of nvm. So we need something else for deno.if it is inbuilt. Much better 😍

[MehrdadKhnzd]

@kitsonk I really think this problem has to be solved inside Deno itself. This is a much-needed feature and it's not that efficient to rely on external tools like nvm. Is there a special reason for leaving this to a community solution rather than to Deno itself?

[kitsonk]

It becomes an recursive type of problem, building into a binary the concept of multiple versions of a binary, and something that is potentially only applicable in certain use cases of which none of us have the experience of how important/meaningful it will be to have multiple runtime versions of Deno at the same time.

Under the concept of "last responsible moment" to make a decision, it should at least wait until we have multiple stable releases. Even then, I would want/expect it to be a seperate tool on the CLI.

[MehrdadKhnzd]

I don't think that it's recursive. deno command could be that separate tool that manages how to use actual different deno binaries based on their version. In other words, the deno command could turn into an upper-level binary which calls different binaries based on arguments and stuff, and I don't see any kind of recursion in this. Isn't this possible?

[cdaringe]

@MehrdadKhnzd, what other runtimes do this? what other programs do this? can you make a compelling, objective argument as to why this program should?

[jsejcksn]

The existing version managers are all platform-fragmented. While I don't agree that it's deno's responsibility to provide binary-versioning functionality, I do think it's in the project's interest to champion a uniform, cross-platform a solution.

[MehrdadKhnzd]

@cdaringe For example, we have .NET Core in which you can have multiple versions installed alongside each other, and you can specify which version to use with each project with a simple property in a config file in the project's folder. And this was always a problem for me in Node.js, even with good tools like nvm, it was a pain rapidly switching between different projects with different requirements. I really think this feature should be added to solve a lot of problems, in addition to changing this platform-specific approach to this problem.

[cdaringe]

@MehrdadKhnzd, respectfully, i'm not grokking what's a poor experience w/ nvm? .nvmrc exists to solve this issue. i even aliased builtin cd to test for nvmrc and autoload it.

[kitsonk]

.NET core is not a runtime binary. It is a set of library files. You still have the same version of a compiler.

[MehrdadKhnzd]

@cdaringe No, that's the problem. It's platform-specific. The Linux version has this support, but the Windows version hasn't. But now I don't request to support a file like .nvmrc, I'm talking about the whole problem, the inconsistencies between tools and platforms, for an every-day problem that exists.

[MehrdadKhnzd]

@kitsonk I really can't see the difference, because as I know it's the only thing that matters. I can run dead-old projects alongside with new, fresh ones without a problem.