[Pkg-javascript-devel] Node.js renaming

[Jérémy Lal]

> On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 7:42 AM, Jérémy Lal <kapouer at melix.org> wrote:
>> On 25/08/2011 23:35, Harlan Lieberman-Berg wrote:
>>> Hi Jérémy,
>>>
>>> My name is Harlan Lieberman-Berg, and I'm a systems administrator for
>>> an advertising company in central Massachusetts, United States of
>>> America. I've also been getting more and more involved in building
>>> Debian packages, both for my company and for the community.  We use a
>>> lot of Perl, so I've started by assisting the Debian Perl Packaging
>>> Group in building their packages.
>>>
>>> Some of my co-workers are beginning to experiment with node, and I
>>> wanted to reach out to you to see if there was anything I could do to
>>> assist you in the nodejs renaming process.  I'm not the most
>>> experienced package builder, and I'm very much not an expert at Debian
>>> policy and politics.  But it seems to me as a mostly outside observer
>>> that there won't be any assistance from either the nodejs upstream or
>>> the node teams, and we (and I am being very generous to myself in the
>>> use of that pronoun) will have no choice but to implement the
>>> mechanism in §10.1 and rename both binaries.  Unless you are planning
>>> to just rename nodejs.
>>>
>>> Please let me know if there is any way I can be of assistance in this matter.
>>>
>>> Sincerely,
>>>
>>> Harlan Lieberman-Berg (hlieberman)
>>
>> Well i'm not hundred percent sure the renaming will happen on the nodejs side,
>> but that's politics indeed. Current situation is not so bad for a fast-moving
>> software like node, unless debian ftpmasters decide to get rid of it. It's available
>> in unstable, along with some of its modules. I plan on package node 0.5 when default
>> backend is uv, and release it to experimental.
>> Meanwhile i agree having a strategy for renaming would be good. A plain rename
>> of the node binary is not a problem. One problem is executable scripts with node shebang.
>> I don't have other problems in mind, so let's start by having a list of them ?
>>
>> Do you mind if we cc that discussion to pkg-javascript-devel ?
>>
>> Jérémy.
>>
>>
On 26/08/2011 17:16, Harlan Lieberman-Berg wrote:
> I don't mind at all - feel free to cc it to pkg-javascript-devel.
> 
> The node shebang seems like it will be the most problematic part of
> this whole thing.  Having the executable anywhere but where upstream
> puts it means two problems, one for us and one for the users in
> general.  One, anything we build that uses node as an interpreter we
> will have to patch to use the new path.  A bit annoying, but certainly
> not the end of the world.

About modules, I was thinking about making something like "npm2deb"
(in the same spirit as gem2deb) that would, among other things, fix shebangs.
I'm not sure it is feasible in a short time.

> I'd be more concerned about the userbase in
> general who will be expecting it to be in one place.

The user base is certainly the most concerned.
However i'm not sure it is so much troublesome : for example, i really
wouldn't be so concerned if php, or ruby, were renamed.

> README.debian
> certainly is an important path to warn people, but I'm afraid they
> won't look there when things break unexpectedly.  Maybe there is a
> more obvious way we can warn them - something through dpkg?

There is a way to warn users at install time, some packages have been
doing that lately (i.e. display a warning and send it to root's mail).

> ( I also wonder if we could skirt around the edges of policy by
> providing a non-default option through dpkg.  'Due to this that and
> the other thing, the node binary has been moved to $loc.  Would you
> like us to symlink $upstream_loc to $loc? This may conflict with the
> package 'node'.  NO/yes )

It's been discussed before... a user who wants "node" in its path
just has to make a symlink to nodejs in ~/bin or /usr/local/bin.
It is simple, maintainable, and policy-compliant.

> The only other problem I can see is confusion between the two - users
> accidentally installing node instead of nodejs.  But there's not much
> we can do about that, really.  Just hope users actually read the short
> description and keep searching. 
> Best,
> 
> Harlan Lieberman-Berg


Jérémy.

List of things to take care when renaming node to nodejs :

* show a big warning and send mail to root when installing
* provide a way to convert script shebangs
* ... or best, provide a npm2deb tool that takes care of this.