[Pkg-javascript-devel] Javascript team policy and rejection of node-three binary package

[Simon McVittie]

On Sat, 03 Mar 2018 at 19:53:42 +0530, Pirate Praveen wrote:
> What do you think about the case of handlebars? In that case I think a
> separate binary is required because the command line tool must declare a
> dependency on nodejs, whereas the javascript library (libjs-*), does not
> require it.

Am I right in saying that nodejs-handlebars (or libjs-handlebars or some
such) contains both a command-line tool, handlebars(1) (or similar), and
a library named handlebars for node.js?

If I understand correctly, best practice for such libraries in other
languages (mandatory for C and recommended for Python/Perl/etc.) is that
the command-line tool is a separate binary package, for better
discoverability (and in the case of Python, to avoid causing random
breakage for users of the command-line tool if it originally used the
Python 2 interpreter and gets moved to Python 3 later).

For instance, src:tap.py builds python3-tap (the Python 3 library for
"import tap"), python-tap (the Python 2 library for "import tap") and
tappy (the tappy(1) command). If you did similar things for JavaScript,
you could have a handlebars package that depends on libjs-handlebars
and nodejs?

    smcv