[Pkg-javascript-devel] please bring yarnpkg back to testing

[Pirate Praveen]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2020 at 17:12, Paolo Greppi <paolo.greppi at libpf.com> 
wrote:
> #960120 is keeping yarnpkg out of testing; there are two ways to 
> resolve this:
> 
> 1. work with upstream to fix this mess (not likely to happen as 
> upstream seems unresponsive)
> 
> 2. revert the changes that caused the issue; the last successful 
> salsa CI pipeline I can find is this one:
> https://salsa.debian.org/js-team/node-yarnpkg/-/commit/877478d5ef3f8a7564cdea211e5cd794fdfb97b5
> so just revert all changes to this repo and the build deps to this 
> status
> 
> I urge those who caused the mess fix it.

Hi Paolo,

We discussed about plan to remove babel 6 from bullseye from the very 
beginning as upstream won't be supporting it for the life time of 
bullseye. You can look at the list archive for those mails. I think it 
is only normal to move to new upstream versions of libraries. We also 
sent list of affected packages frequently to the list. No one suggested 
to keep babel 6 in testing at that time. You had a chance to request 
keeping babel 6 before it was removed as well. Marking for autoremoval 
was also a warning (node-yarnpkg was also marked for auto removal when 
I filed rc bug against node-babel), you could have requested keeping 
babel 6 for longer, though eventually it has to be removed from 
bullseye if no one steps up to maintain it.

If someone wants to keep babel 6, they have to step in and take up 
maintenance. Or you could even embed babel 6 in yarnpkg as it is the 
only package currently in the archive that does not work without babel 
7. Introducing babel 6 back in testing means supporting babel 6 and 7 
for the life time of bullseye. Are you prepared to do that? If someone 
volunteers to maintain babel 6 in bullseye, we can still introduce it 
back, though my preference would be to fix yarnpkg or wait for yarnpkg 
2 (which supports babel 7 already), even if it means missing bullseye 
and getting it in bullseye-backports.

This is nothing specific to yarnpkg here, that is how every library 
transition works. For example in ruby team, we moved to rails 6 and the 
packages that did not support rails 6 were removed from testing 
(applications like redmine, open-build-system and diaspora were not 
compatible with rails 6). We cannot expect old versions of libraries 
will be supported forever in debian.

Thanks
Praveen