Contrib.social

Depend on Package Manager

Open on Drupal.org →
Created on 4 July 2025, about 1 month ago

Problem/Motivation

This issue is for 2.1.x only.

With Package Manager a core module on a (slow-moving, but steady) path to stability, why doesn't Project Browser just depend on it outright, as a hard dependency, rather than a soft one?

If you install Drupal and Project Browser, with the intent of using it to install modules, you will not be able to do it unless you also know that you have to install Package Manager -- which, by the way, cannot be enabled in the UI right now without changing a setting (which is a developer task) -- and you have to configure a Project Browser setting to enable it.

What's the point of all this friction? What does it get us besides frustrating the >90% use case of people who want to use Project Browser to install modules and recipes?

This may have made sense when Package Manager was a submodule of Automatic Updates, under heavy development. But it's a core module with a beta-stability API. We should revisit this.

Proposed resolution

Add a hard dependency on Package Manager, with an update path that enables it if it's not already.

📌 Task
Status

Active

Version

2.1

Component

Code

Created by

🇺🇸United States phenaproxima Massachusetts

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Comments & Activities

  • Issue created by @phenaproxima
  • Comment about 1 month ago →
    🇺🇸United States phenaproxima Massachusetts
  • Comment about 1 month ago →
    🇺🇸United States chrisfromredfin Portland, Maine

    I am not necessarily opposed, especially if it makes things easier, except that it should be possible to use Project Browser as a "window shopping" tool only without Package Manager installed. So making it an outright dependency seems to contradict that. That said, people could still turn off the install/download ability inside of Project Browser without having to uninstall Package Manager, but then PM is installed _possibly_ for no reason (unless user is using it for AU, etc.)

  • Comment about 1 month ago →
    🇺🇸United States chrisfromredfin Portland, Maine

    (Are there other ways to reduce friction?)

  • Comment 9 days ago →
    🇺🇸United States phenaproxima Massachusetts

    it should be possible to use Project Browser as a "window shopping" tool only without Package Manager installed

    Having it depend on Package Manager doesn't mean that you couldn't use Project Browser for window shopping. You could just turn off allow_ui_install and that'd be the end of it.

    Another option: when Package Manager is installed, automatically opt into allowing UI installs. This would be trivial to implement with hook_modules_installed(). It wouldn't do anything about the core warning and testing_package_manager setting, but that setting only affects installing Package Manager in the UI, so people using drush en package_manager or installing via a recipe (i.e., drupal_cms_admin_ui, which enables Project Browser) would be unaffected.

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