[Pkg-javascript-devel] Bug#842420: Status of packaging Electron?

[Praveen Arimbrathodiyil]

On 15/01/24 12:08 pm, Otto Kekäläinen wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I am a big fan of Pulsar[1] so I filed the ITP[2] for it which led me
> to dive into the status of Electron[3] and NodeJS and JavaScript in
> Debian in general.
> 
> Electron seems already to be shipped[4] among others in FreeBSD ports,
> Arch, Manjaro, Nix and OpenSUSE, but not in Fedora or Debian. The
> approach in Debian seems to be that each npm module is converted into
> a deb package, and thus the JS team has 1700+ packages to maintain[5].
> Electron packaging has been pending for the past 7 years due to this
> packaging dependency requirement I assume.

This requirement is relaxed these days, see 
https://salsa.debian.org/js-team/node-yarnpkg/-/blob/master/debian/watch?ref_type=heads 
for example. Some of the modules that are only useful to electron/pulsar 
could be included directly in that source package.

You can also try to create a package in contrib first which will install 
dependencies via npm in postinst and gradually package the modules and 
later move to main.

See 
https://salsa.debian.org/ruby-team/gitlab/-/blob/master/debian/rake-tasks.sh?ref_type=heads#L48

We also have yarn-plugin-apt which can take the apt installed modules 
when available and only remaining needs to be installed from npmjs.com

> So I guess the logical next step is just to map out all dependencies
> of Electron (and Pulsar) and then simply get each npm module they
> depend on packaged one-by-one?
> 
> Can somebody who has a working setup of js_task_edit.py[6] update the
> Electron wiki page and also create a new one for Pulsar?
> 
> And once we have the list we can start using npm2deb[7] and following
> the NodeJS packaging guide[8] we just package the modules and see how
> far we get with reasonable effort?
> 
> - Otto
> 
> [1] https://optimizedbyotto.com/post/pulsar-best-text-file-and-code-editor/
> [2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1060778
> [3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=842420
> [4] https://repology.org/project/electron/versions
> [5] https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-javascript-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org
> [6] https://wiki.debian.org/Javascript/Nodejs/Tasks
> [7] https://wiki.debian.org/Javascript/Nodejs/Npm2Deb
> [8] https://wiki.debian.org/Javascript/Nodejs/Manual
> 
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