[Pkg-javascript-devel] Javascript trigger design

[Thomas Goirand]

Hi,

Web application have evolved into monsters that needs lots of
javascript. It's very common that these javascript applications are
collecting all the .js library they use, concatenate them into a single
file, and compress the result using all sorts of tools (node uglify is
one of the implementation, but that's not the only one).

As much as possible, as good Debian citizens, we do package each and
every javascript library into a separate package. But then, if there's
an update of that JS library, the Web application package has to somehow
know about it, and redo the concatenate & compress job. Otherwise, the
web app would continue to use the old version.

I have this issue with the OpenStack dashboard (ie: Horizon), but also
with a second web app which I'm currently packaging (OpenStack Fuel,
which is a deployment software for OpenStack). Though this could of
course be generalize to any JS app.

It's been a long time I've been thinking about it, and I believe that
the only way to do this, would be to use triggers. Though I have never
used triggers, and I thought it was a good idea to ask my DD friends and
this list about it. Should there be one trigger per web app? How would
this work?

Thoughts anyone? Jonas maybe, who did lots of JS packaging?

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)