[Pkg-javascript-devel] node packages in NEW

[Thorsten Alteholz]

Hi everybody,

as you already know, there is a big number of node packages waiting in 
NEW. Does Debian really need all those packages?

node packages are rather small and often consist only of a few lines of 
code. From my point of view it is very unlikely that such packages will 
change over time, so their code will remain constant forever. More likely 
upstreams will add new features and pay no attention to backward 
compatible APIs.

In the node ecosystem everything is fine. Their developers use carets or 
tildes as dependency operators and just depened on the version of the API 
they really need.

In Debian such packages basically create two problems. They bloat the 
packages file, which prolongs the process of installing or updating 
packages. Further Debian only allows packages with one, the latest, 
version in the archive. So uploading packages with the newer API would 
make packages unusable, that still depend on the older API. Usually this 
is not recognized and suddenly packages in the archive won't work anymore. 
One could introduce versions within package names, but this would just 
multiply the number of node packages.

To answer my question from above: no, nobody needs these small packages.

But of course Debian wants to have packages with a certain functionality. 
Stuff like grunt, d3, babel and npm totally make sense to have.

So in order to reduce the number of node packages that appear in NEW and 
the archive one might lessen the Debian embedding policy.
What do you think about embedding ...
  - small modules that are not going to be changed and contain less than
    50 lines of code (this limit is totally arbitrary)
  - put together packages that belong together; I am not sure here, but
    wouldn't it be fine to have just one package node-d3 or node-babel
    that contains all corresponding modules (though their different versions
    might create problems in keeping track of them)?
In order to not lose track of the installed software, providing something 
like debian/modules.embedded might be nice to have?

As you know your tools best, can you please create a proposal of how you 
would like to handle maintenance in such a new situation?

Maybe we can already start by removing node-is-generator-fn, node-is-npm, 
node-is-unc-path and node-isstream and create a wiki page to keep track of 
all node modules that are candidates of being embedded?

Though I admit it might be a bit demotivating, we would like to REJECT all 
node packages currently in NEW and start as soon as possible with the new 
policy.

   Thorsten, on behalf of the ftpmasters