[Pkg-javascript-devel] Javascript policy and npm2deb

[Hubert Chathi]

On Wed, 11 Oct 2017 16:19:30 +0530, Pirate Praveen <praveen at onenetbeyond.org> said:

> Hi, In a recent bug report, I came across this disparity,
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=877213#36

> npm2deb creates source packages with node- prefix. I think the policy
> should be updated to reflect this.

Yup.  https://wiki.debian.org/Javascript/Nodejs/Manual says that the
source package should be called "node-", which is clearly a conflict
with what https://wiki.debian.org/Javascript/Policy says.  It becomes
even more silly when you have a source package that happens to build,
say, a Node library, a Python module, and a C library, since you may end
up with a Python package whose source package is named "node-something".
(In fact, if emscripten ever becomes usable in Debian again, I have one
source package that could potentially produce binary packages for
JavaScript, NodeJS, Java, Python, Objective-C, and C.  It would be fun
if the Python and Java policies also told me how to name the source
package.)

IMHO, the policies should not mandate a source package name, which is
partially why I omitted it from my proposed JavaScript policy
(https://wiki.debian.org/HubertChathi/JavaScriptPolicy -- which I still
need to update).  It might be fine to *suggest* a name, but I don't
think it should be a "should"/"recommend" (at least not in the sense
that those words are used in the Debian Policy Manual).  My preference
would be to completely remove those clauses from the policies, but at
the very least, the node and JavaScript policies should be made
consistent.

-- 
Hubert Chathi <uhoreg at debian.org> -- https://www.uhoreg.ca/
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