I was listening to the DrupalEasy Podcast episode 184 this morning, with Marc Drummond, and the part about being required to build a Drupal 8 site with Composer made my stomach lurch a bit. I had no idea!
This site, as I may have mentioned, is my first real Drupal 8 site, and I've had a lot of fun with the fact that I've been able to do everything (I think) I've wanted to with nothing but a core install. (I think. Is Devel contrib? Am I using Devel? I can't remember.) Now I'm given pause as I start to think about contrib modules and what else I might want to be able to experiment with, because, frankly, Composer has always felt like...I don't know. Weird. I haven't enjoyed it much. It seems like I've always run into some problem with it any time I've tried using it to set up Drush; maybe it's just me, or maybe the documentation on this stuff just isn't production-ready yet.
Something. Headache. Ow.
Link:
Will Composer be a barrier for sitebuilders to use Drupal 8? (Goodbye, tarballs…