Refactor towards ROP

[theimowski]

What do you guys think about employing the Railway Oriented Programming in Paket codebase?

One obvious benefit would be that in case of any failure, no file would get modified. (yeah I know one could simply git reset, but that is probably not the best UX)

A command-line tool seems like a good candidate for the ROP technique.
As a volunteer I could do an experiment with the commands I'm most familiar with, i.e. convert-from-nuget and simplify to see where we can get to.

Edit:
List of paket commands that use ROP:

• Init
• Add
• Remove
• Install
• Restore
• Update
• Outdated
• ConvertFromNuget
• InitAutoRestore
• Simplify
• FindRefs
• Config

[isaacabraham]

I'm using that approach on another project with a lot of success. It works well when there's a clear, linear pipeline of operations.

[forki]

I have no objections ;-)

[forki]

are you going to refactor other commands as well?

[theimowski]

I plan to, but surely it can take more time.
Applying ROP gradually (i.e. not in a single PR) to the commands should be less error-prone

[forki]

+1

[forki]

I wonder what Scott Wlashin is thinking about this!? It's becoming probably the biggest OSS project on ROP.

[theimowski]

yeah, it'd be great if he could review the stuff one day when more commands use ROP, and tell whether that's what he meant 👍