ChuMP and the Zen of Package Management

Nicholas Shaheed, and Ge Wang

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

ChuMP stands for “ChucK Manager of Packages”, designed to automate the process of installing, upgrading, and removing software components for the ChucK programming ecosystem. ChuMP manages libraries, tools, audio and graphics plugins in a centralized, structured, and versioned manner. This project originated out of the recent ChucK development “renaissance” alongside a growing user community, now entering its third decade. The time for package management, as the ChucK slogan goes, is now. What began as a practical project has expanded into broader reflections on tool-building, service, and community. As we labored on what seemed like a “no-brainer” tool that everyone wanted but that no one wanted to build, questions arose: “how did we get here?”, “what is the role of service-based tool-building in our field–and what, if any, is its research value?”—in short, “can we even write a paper about a package manager?” Meanwhile, we couldn’t help but notice that the act of creating a package manager seems to unify not only disparate software fragments, but also something of community. In other words, there may be more than meets the eye. This paper chronicles the making of a package manager and all that goes along with it. This is the story of ChuMP.

Citation

Nicholas Shaheed, and Ge Wang. 2025. ChuMP and the Zen of Package Management. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15698984 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@article{nime2025_90,
 abstract = {ChuMP stands for “ChucK Manager of Packages”, designed to automate the process of installing, upgrading, and removing software components for the ChucK programming ecosystem. ChuMP manages libraries, tools, audio and graphics plugins in a centralized, structured, and versioned manner. This project originated out of the recent ChucK development “renaissance” alongside a growing user community, now entering its third decade. The time for package management, as the ChucK slogan goes, is now. What began as a practical project has expanded into broader reflections on tool-building, service, and community. As we labored on what seemed like a “no-brainer” tool that everyone wanted but that no one wanted to build, questions arose: “how did we get here?”, “what is the role of service-based tool-building in our field–and what, if any, is its research value?”—in short, “can we even write a paper about a package manager?” Meanwhile, we couldn’t help but notice that the act of creating a package manager seems to unify not only disparate software fragments, but also something of community. In other words, there may be more than meets the eye. This paper chronicles the making of a package manager and all that goes along with it. This is the story of ChuMP.},
 address = {Canberra, Australia},
 articleno = {90},
 author = {Nicholas Shaheed and Ge Wang},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.15698984},
 editor = {Doga Cavdir and Florent Berthaut},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 numpages = {8},
 pages = {610--617},
 title = {ChuMP and the Zen of Package Management},
 track = {Paper},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2025/nime2025_90.pdf},
 year = {2025}
}