[Pkg-javascript-devel] Bug#754462: Bug#862051: nodejs (6.11.2~dfsg-1) experimental; urgency=medium

[Didier 'OdyX' Raboud]

Le jeudi, 31 août 2017, 12.25:50 h CEST Ian Jackson a écrit :
> Philip Hands writes ("Bug#862051: nodejs (6.11.2~dfsg-1) experimental; 
urgency=medium"):
> > I guess that one could do something like moving the symlink into another
> > -legacy style package, and recomend that from the main package for one
> > release to keep upgrades happy. Then drop the recomendation, and wait
> > for popcon to show that people are not installing the package any more.
> > Then remove the package in testing early in a cycle and see if anyone
> > reports bugs about it.
> 
> Even that would be quite unfriendly, because third party scripts might
> easily be deployed onto new Debian installs as well as existing ones.
> 
> Also, it is imposing an administrative burden on all Debian users (the
> metadata for the -legacy package, spurious search hits, etc.).  That
> burden might be small but would be completely unjustified.

This exact argument stands against not allowing NodeJS to use /usr/bin/node in 
the first place, really. We accepted to enforce that change for the /usr/bin/ 
namespace "first-come-first-served" reason. We imposed a quite heavy 
administrative burden of either targetting /u/b/nodejs additionally or (finding 
out and) installing nodejs-legacy for anyone wanting to use NodeJS on Debian.

Now, there are two categories of scripts affected by this discussion:
* All scripts which support /u/b/nodejs *in addition* to /u/b/node. These do 
so _because_ of a Debian-specific change, and removing the /u/b/nodejs symlink 
is not going to break those.
* All scripts which support /u/b/nodejs *exclusively*. These do so _because_ 
of a Debian-specific change, and don't support *any* non-Debian-derivative 
target (checked Fedora's nodejs RPMs: no /u/b/nodejs). Maintainers of those 
scripts have at one point decided to support only Debian{, and derivatives}.

There are _plenty_ of changes that one needs to care about in a stable 
upgrade: things like mandatory postfixing of Apache configuration files, removal 
of specific Python3 versions, removal of upstart, etc. Having to change a 
shebang isn't a big deal given the amount of things one has to check accross a 
stable release upgrade.

All that to say that despite the very small cost of keeping the symlink 
around, I do see value in closing the Debian-specific /u/b/nodejs chapter *at 
some point*. We should not clutter our future releases indefinitely with 
convenience symlinks for historical reasons, especially not when these were 
created _by_ Debian and have only been _in_ Debian.

Le jeudi, 31 août 2017, 13.52:00 h CEST Jérémy Lal a écrit :
> How about printing a "nice" warning explaining it would be a good idea to
> move to /usr/bin/node ? Then in next next release drop the nodejs symlink.

This seems like a very good plan to me: let /u/b/nodejs spit out a deprecation 
warning to stderr / syslog but pass all arguments to /u/b/node in Buster; 
remove it entirely in Bullseye & get proper release note entries for both 
Buster and Bullseye.

Cheers.
    OdyX
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