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

[Sam Hartman]

>>>>> "Dominique" == Dominique Dumont <dod at debian.org> writes:

    Dominique> On Thursday, 31 August 2017 13:58:23 CEST Thorsten Glaser wrote:
    >> > How about printing a "nice" warning explaining it would be a
    >> good idea to > move to /usr/bin/node ?
    >> 
    >> That will break scripts that do:
    >> 
    >> x=$(nodejs somescript)

    Dominique> This kind of script won't break if the deprecation
    Dominique> warning is sent to STDERR


Sigh.
I wish I had seen your message before your earlier reply.
This breaks too in more complex situations involving ssh, things like
expect scripts and the like.
There are cases where people mix stderr and stdout.  There are cases
where people treat any unexpected output on stderr as a failure in
automated scripts.

The next level you can look at is considering whether /dev/stdin in a
tty and printing the warning to either stderr or /dev/tty only in that
case.
And that will reduce the breakage but not remove it.
And yes, when you actually have something it's important to deprecate,
accepting some level of breakage and adopting one of those strategies is
the right thing.

It's just not worth it in this case.
People who use more than Debian are very quickly going to learn that
/usr/bin/node is preferred to /usr/bin/nodejs.
As several people have already pointed out we've far exceeded the amount
of effort in considering whether to deprecate or remove the link that
will be spent maintaining the link until the end of time.
In one sense we've already lost:-)