Why aren't dependencies explicit?

Looking around I noticed that many packages in the pex-gl organization do not appear to explicitly reference each other via the dependencies field in their package.json files.

I noticed this: https://github.com/pex-gl/pex/blob/master/lib/pkg/pex-packages-core.json

Which seems to make sure that if you use pex init your project gets all the right things installed, but I’m curious to understand why this approach is used over the more traditional dependencies field?

[vorg]

Ok, first step is behind us

plask-wrap@1.0.0

These modules no longer need -i plask flag pex-sys v1.5.1 updated in https://github.com/pex-gl/pex-sys/commit/e9b2407554a4f994d4ad27f5fae676e3e4250cff pex-context v1.3.0 updated in https://github.com/pex-gl/pex-context/commit/f4b2eeae8f56fd60ba95112d8e63227c26a3912a pex-io v1.2.0 updated in https://github.com/pex-gl/pex-io/commit/6b36dbc4c8764f6a8c4e4519c9c58769acba94fc

Still need to update https://github.com/pex-gl/pex-gui/issues/7

[vorg]

Window.create({
    context: new Context(),

This is currently not possible as Context creation is platform specific and that functionality is within Window. Peer dependencies problem in pex has two versions.

Explicit

In pex-sys/WindowImplBrowser:

var Context  = require('pex-context/Context');
...
windowPex._ctx = new Context(gl);

We should probably add pex-context to the package json of pex-sys as we require it.

Implicit

In pex-gui/GUI:

function GUI(ctx, windowWidth, windowHeight, pixelRatio) {
...
ctx.createMesh()

Where we don’t do node require for pex-context but we assume that what we get as ctx is certain version of the pex-context/Context that has createMesh method. I don’t know how to get rid of that kind of dependency.