[Pkg-javascript-devel] Node.js and it's future in debian

[Carl Fürstenberg]

Hello,

There has been an log struggle between the nodejs package and the node
package, which is still unresolved (bug #611698 for example) And I
wonder now what the future should look like.

To summarize the problem:
* the nodejs upstream binary is called "node", and the upstream
developers have refused to change it's binary name to nodejs for
debian;
* The the hamradio package "node" shipping a binary called "node", and
as it's so old, the developers argue that the package must ship a
binary called "node" or breakage will occur.
* The reason the nodejs developers want to ship the binary as "node"
is because all programs written for nodejs all has /usr/bin/node in
it's shebang
* the nodejs package are not allowed to conflict on the node package
just because the binary name is the same

As I'm not a hamradio user, I'm off course biased towards letting
nodejs having the "node" binary and let it pass to testing. But we
must find a solution to this, as nodejs is getting more and more used,
and developers are forced to install nodejs from source to be able to
use it instead of install it via the package manager.

Regards,

Carl Fürstenberg