On 22.4.2012 15:53, Adrian Alves wrote:
I already open a ticket in bugzilla Bug 815018 - Review Request: nodejs - javascript fast build framework
I really have to warn you against doing this. I was trying to help to T.C.Hollingsworth on bug 634911 and we gave up in disgust. NodeJS is quite interesting project filled with incredibly enthusiastic followers, but its packaging is a beast. First of all you need to coordinate with V8 (and not break spot's chromium on the way ... there is a strong correlation between love for NodeJS and love for Chromium, so usually people one to have both installed), then NodeJS itself used to have constantly changing dependencies on the low-level libraries (maybe they have already settled down on something more stable, but it used to be horrible), and then you have NPM and tons .npm package for packaging of NodeJS to make at least any sense (see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=732552&hide_resolved=0 for what we went through).
You have to deal with all of this in the community which has almost no rel-eng culture (everything seems like a mess of various github repositories with just very loosely defined dependencies), you are constantly struggling with weird bugs breaking everything (e.g., just now I cannot install npm packages because of https://github.com/isaacs/npm/issues/2376), all that with minimal support from upstream or downstream (I haven't seen much interest in actual packaging work ... people who could be interested in non-browser JavaScript were either burnt already themselves, or they couldn't imagine otherworld than the fragile web of github submodules and they didn't care).
I mean, I would really love to like NodeJS as my platform (even more when JavaScript was 100% of my programming even in my work duties), but all my attempts were so riddled with endless frustration from all sides, that I just gave up.
From the good side, there are some people who didn't give up completely yet ... particularly I would emphasize T.C. Hollingsworth (on CC of this email, so he may correct my probably excessive pessimism) who maintains independently on http://nodejs.tchol.org/ (I don't know why he doesn't use repos.fedorapeople.org ... it would give him better visibility and less bandwidth demands on his machine) whole NodeJS stack. I think coordinating with him might be very fruitful for whole endeavor.
Best, Matěj -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
