Difference between dependency and package managers?

Question

Practically speaking, are these essentially synonymous? Or is there something I'm missing? I've use Composer (PHP), CocoaPods (Objective-C), and Bundler (Rails). I believe they describe themselves as dependency managers but can they also be consider as package mangers?

Answer 1

I'd say yes. Given that the javascript community calls their version of those tools (NPM and bower) "package managers", I think that the development community has essentially synonymized those terms.

EDIT I'm going to backtrack a bit. In general, I think the term package manager has to do with the delivery and installation of third party code. That said, npm is correctly named the node package manager. As I see it, a dependency manager is a different thing. It's an runtime orchestration tool. For example, there are dependency managers that simply run in the browser to load asset files in the proper order (think requireJS, browserify, cartero, etc... - or think a Dependency Injection container in say Symfony2 or Laravel) but you wouldn't call those package managers. A package manager would be something like Debian's dpkg or the node community's bower, which actually downloads third party libraries for you (that aren't currently in your software suite). Now, I think the burred lines come in when package managers decided to be smart enough to resolve version numbers for us. Because tools like npm make sure that each piece of software we declare has all of the proper versions of it's dependencies (by downloading a chain of dependencies for us), we want to call it a dependency manager. But I think it's more proper to say that it's a package manager that happens to do version resolution. It's really more of a delivery mechanism than a runtime tool, though.

All that to say, I'd like to hear what others have to say about this.

Answer 2

No, they are not synonyms. Look At that answer for their difference

https://stackoverflow.com/a/27290095/4016254