Devs, Mikeal and I were talking and we came up with a sane way to do CommonJS in map and reduce.
Refresher: we don't have CommonJS require there now because the current CommonJS implementation is scoped to the whole design doc, and giving views access to load code from anywhere in the design doc would mean we'd have to blow away your view index anytime you changed anything. Having to rebuild views from scratch just because you changed some CSS or a show function isn't fun,so we avoided the issue by keeping CommonJS require out of map and reduce altogether. The solution we came up with is to allow CommonJS inside map and reduce funs, but only of libraries that are stored inside the views part of the design doc. So you could continue to access CommonJS code in design_doc.foo, from your list functions etc, but we'd add the ability to require CommonJS modules within map and reduce, but only from design_doc.views.lib There's no worry here about namespace collisions, as Couch just plucks views.*.map and views.*.reduce out of the design doc. So you could have a view called "lib" if you wanted, and still have CommonJS stored in views.lib.sha1 and views.lib.stemmer if you wanted. We could allow CommonJS modules to be stored anywhere in ddoc.views, but I think it will simplify the implementation to enforce that they be stored in views.lib -- if people think that is too restrictive, please speak up now, otherwise I'll start to implement this. Chris -- Chris Anderson http://jchrisa.net http://couch.io
