[Pkg-javascript-devel] Request for Advice: gulp plugins and lots of dependencies

[Hilko Bengen]

Hi,

I am working on packaging a new version of GRR, an incident response
platform that is written mostly in Python, with a browser-based UI using
AngularJS.

Apparently, the Javascript components that are sent to the browser are
built/combined using Gulp using several plug-ins that are not in Debian,
requiring a flood of other NodeJS packages, all in all more than 20 of
them. Below is my initial list of packages that are not in Debian/unstable
yet.

Q1: Am I really supposed to prepare, upload, and eventually maintain all
those packages so I am able to build that browser UI component? Or is
there another way?

Q2: I noticed that the node-gulp-less package created by npm2deb depends
on node-less (>= 2.6.0), the current version of node-less in unstable is
1.6.3~dfsg-2. The version number difference (assuming semantic
versioning) suggests API breakage between the versions, so simply
upgrading node-less is probably not an option. Is it possible to have
multiple versions of NodeJS packages with the same name installed into
/usr/lib/nodejs?

- gulp-angular-templatecache: event-stream, gulp-header, gulp-footer

- gulp-footer: event-stream

- event-stream: from, map-stream, pause-stream, stream-combiner

- gulp-closure-compiler: temp-write

- gulp-closure-deps

- gulp-if: gulp-match ternary-stream

- gulp-insert: stream-queue

- gulp-less: accord, less >= 2.6.0

- accord: indx

- gulp-sass: node-sass

- node-sass: async-foreach, gaze, in-publish, sass-graph, stdout-stream, true-case-path

Cheers,
-Hilko