Does anyone think this can finally be the tool to bring sane package management to client side JavaScript development? I'm hesitant to use any of the existing tools because none of them support all the libraries I use, so I'd end up doing stuff manually anyway, and I don't have any confidence that any of them will keep working in the long term.
No. If anything, it will probably just get even more fragmented before the situation gets better. As we understand the features and architectures of package management systems better it becomes even easier to write package managers. This is a good thing long-term because we can more thoroughly explore the solution space before settling on a few "winners". However, at the same time package repositories are fundamentally a network effects problem because packages depend upon other packages, so the repository with the most packages offers the most benefit for each additional package because new packages can build on everything that already exists instead of bundling that functionality themselves.
The reason why I am skeptical of new entrants into the javascript package management arena is that there is already a package manager with over 14k packages and a vibrant community that is producing packages at a very high rate: npm. npm might not be the best package manager as-is for browser development, but tools like browserify (disclaimer: I wrote browserify), ender, or many others can let your browser code use much of the value that has already been created for npm, even though npm is primarily about node.js packages. A surprising number of modules written for node will just work in tools like browserify.
Any upstart package systems would be wise to have a clear and simple path for unlocking the value created in the node community because there is too much value being created in npm to ignore. Whether that path involves adding fields to the package.json, tools to bridge the gap between package repositories, fancy in-browser trickery or compile steps remains an open question but it would be really pointless to require people to publish their modules that they've already put on npm to buy in to yet another package system, especially since there seems to be a new package manager every month lately.
but dep management in the browser is still so different then the npm workflow. it's not just code you have to worry about, it's css/html/static resources
Well, RequireJS is pretty solid for client side package management. With solid config files you can build out large client side applications that grab dependencies asynchronously, and it DOES work with everything.
... so long as you wrap all the files in the particular variant of define() function that works with requirejs (but not with other competing AMD function signatures). And then you might want to use some modules written for commonjs or node with `exports`, so you'll need a tool to transform those files. And then you'll probably want to compile the application into a single javascript bundle in production for performance.
I'm not saying bower is any better in any of these respects, just that everything is terrible.
Nope, RequireJS can load any kind of Javascript dependency, even if it doesn't use the AMD format. You can even specify dependencies for non-AMD scripts in the configuration object.[0]
As for define(), there's only one AMD method signature: define([[name,] deps,] fn). Any loader that does not accept this signature cannot legitimately call itself an AMD loader.
