The Coursier Metals Requirement

[davesmith00000]

Hi,

If possible, I'd like to understand the requirement to install Metals via Coursier.

I managed to get Zed working with Scala briefly and thought the Metals integration was great! It didn't last long though.

Using Coursier is awkward for me because I tend to use Nix for a lot of tooling set up, and it seems the two don't work well together.

I don't want to get into the details of my exact set up (work machine), I'm just wondering if Coursier does something special that we could replicate via other installation methods? Or if the extension could be made more generally compatible?

Thanks!

[tgodzik]

@davesmith00000 totally missed you message. You should be able to set COURSIER_CACHE per workspace to point to the local workspace (though it will duplicate a lot of jars for a lot of projects) but this would be more in line with how Nix works.

@SlowBrainDude I would try and refrain a bit with the comments, there is plenty of reason why things are working as they are currently and no need to criticise other people's work in this manner.

Building everything from sources and having fully reproducible builds can easily turn into nightmare for people and is not feasible on all possible configurations. Each approach has its issues, though there is no actual security issue here. Jar are not really binaries that can be run on their own, you still need to do that via java. The biggest issue is that caches could break or users might not be fully aware where their artifacts are. Source dependencies would not solve any security problems if users choose to run something themselves.