[Pkg-javascript-devel] Small Node.js packages in NEW

[Sebastiaan Couwenberg]

Hi Thorsten,

Thanks for your work on the NEW queue.

On 2015-04-03 Thorsten Alteholz wrote on his blog [1]:
> Recently the NEW queue grew due to lots of uploads of new KDE
> software and several smaller node-packages. The KDE-stuff will be
> processed one after another, but the node-stuff seems to be rather
> strange. After the last discussion I was told that all those small
> packages can be accumulated into bigger chunks. I hope this
> discussion doesn’t need to be repeated again …

Since I'm responsible for quite a number of these Node.js packages, I'm
afraid further discussion is required.

I suspect "the last discussion" was about the node-chalk package and its
dependencies. After the initial packager abandoned the effort Jérémy did
some work to bundle the dependencies, but did not follow through to an
actual upload.

I picked up the chalk related packages because they're part of the
OpenLayers 3 dependency chain [2], but decided against bundling the
dependencies because it complicates the packaging too much.

While the chalk dependencies are at this time only required for chalk,
they have many more dependents [3-7] in the Node.js ecosystem. When we
package some of those dependents they should in my opinion depend only
on the (small) module package instead of the chalk because they need one
of its dependencies.

Instead of bundling the dependencies in the dependent package, we could
also introduce a nodejs-modules package to bundle various small modules.
This look a little cleaner to me dependency-wise, but it still has the
same drawbacks of pulling in more than required and the one-to-many
relationship between the source package and its various upstreams
complicates the packaging too much.

Do you have a better solution to the small Node.js packages problem?

I think that the way the Node.js module ecosystem is structured warrants
an exception to the "avoid small packages" guideline.

Kind Regards,

Bas

[1] http://blog.alteholz.eu/2015/04/my-debian-activities-in-march-2015/
[2] https://wiki.debian.org/Javascript/Nodejs/Tasks/openlayers
[3] https://www.npmjs.com/package/ansi-styles
[4] https://www.npmjs.com/package/escape-string-regexp
[5] https://www.npmjs.com/package/has-ansi
[6] https://www.npmjs.com/package/strip-ansi
[7] https://www.npmjs.com/package/supports-color

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