[Pkg-javascript-devel] parallel installation

[Mathias Behrle]

* Hubert Chathi: " [Pkg-javascript-devel] parallel installation" (Mon, 14 Aug
  2017 14:38:34 -0400):

I appreciate very much the initiative to find a common procedure for making
different versions of JS libs available while still being compliant to policy.
The very special use case for me is tryton-sao [1], which was already in NEW but
which I had to withdraw, because it didn't (and still does not) support the
jquery version in stretch.

> At the BoF at DebConf, we were talking about parallel installation of
> different versions of JS libraries.  In order to do parallel
> installation, we'd need differently named packages for different
> versions, and it seems like the obvious way to do that is to have
> packages called something like libjs-fooVER and node-fooVER, where VER
> some sort of the API version, similar to the way that C/C++ library
> packages are named after the library SONAME.  If upstream follows semver
> properly, then VER would be the major version number.

I wonder why we should not also support MAJOR.MINOR as VER, if needed in
special cases. I am not that familiar with the JS world, but I think to
remember, that e.g. jquery didn't always follow properly semver and in such
cases it could be necessary to have a special MINOR available in the archive.
>
> For libjs-fooVER, the JavaScript files would probably go in
> /usr/share/javascript/fooVER/ rather than /usr/share/javascript/foo.
> Obviously everything that previously pointed to the old place would have
> to now point to the new place, but we could create a libjs-foo
> transitional package libjs-foo that symlinks /usr/share/javascript/foo
> to /usr/share/javascript/fooVER so that existing packages don't break.
> 
> For node-fooVER, the logical analogue would be to put the files in
> /usr/lib/nodejs/fooVER.  However, anything that uses the library does
> "require("foo")", and so would not be able to find it there.  There are
> a couple possible options for fixing that I can think of.  The first is
> to change all "require("foo")" to "require("fooVER")", but that sounds
> painful to do.  The second option is to add a symlink from
> node_modules/foo to /usr/lib/nodejs/fooVER in the root directory of the
> thing that requires foo.  I think the second option is the best,
> especially since Node upstream seems to prefer searching for things in
> node_modules rather than in /usr/lib/nodejs.  And again, we may want to
> create a transitional package node-foo that symlinks /usr/lib/nodejs/foo
> to /usr/lib/nodejs/fooVER.

This second option sounds most reasonable to me.


[1] https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/tryton/tryton-sao.git/

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    Mathias Behrle
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