Cannot install different version of already installed Polymer element about declarativewidgets

[peller]

looking at this now

[lbustelo]

I don't think that this is easily 100% fixable. We could add the force flag on the link tag to get the package to install.

The problem is that we won't be able to register the element at all because the browser already has it registered. It seems that only a page refresh would do.

[jhpedemonte]

Understand about the page refresh -- makes sense. But I think this is still an issue then. I can change a package reference to point to a different version, refresh the page, and it still won't install the new version (since it already exists in bower).

[purdrew]

One risk here is that there is no way to guarantee that the version requested is there the next time you run the notebook. If another notebook forces the installation of a different version, your requested version would be lost since bower uses a flat directory structure (only one version of a package is kept).

[jhpedemonte]

One solution would be to have one bower_components dir per notebook. That way, each notebook would be fully in control of what is installed and what it uses. Only downside is that there would be a lot of duplication.

[dalogsdon]

The bower install API allows the form <name>=<package>#<version>. This could be used to install different dependency versions under the covers so that different notebooks can use different versions. The <name> could be the package name with a version string.

For example, if the user wanted iron-list 1.0.1, widgets could do:

bower install iron-list-1.0.1=iron-list#1.0.1

This could work with the global bower_install.

[lbustelo]

@peller have abandoned this issue. If so, I would like to remove the in progress tag. This is not high priority and could hurt more than help.

[peller]

+1

[purdrew]

+1 to providing some means of forcing an install of an already installed bower package. I am currently developing a notebook where I am using some hacks/fixes to some of our components and some third party components. Every time I find something else I need to fix I need to go to the container (which I don't own) and have the packages removed so my updates can be downloaded.

[lbustelo]

Related to #145