On 22/01/2021 13:29, Rhialto wrote:
Well I don't know about the go case but trying to make it so that an javascript application using npm gets its dependencies from from packages rather than downloading them with npm or yarn will be massively painful.An interesting article on LWN. If they come up with some solution (but so far it doesn't look like it) this could be useful for pkgsrc too.
I've got a relatively simple js app that runs as a daemon and implements a few REST API's. That app has 100s of dependencies and even with automation the sheer workload of creating a package dependency for each one will be massive.
You also commonly get into situations where different applications need a different version of the same package. So you would have to work out some way of having multiple versions of the same package installed at the same time. This is situation normal for javascript as each application assumes its got its own node_modules directory to keep its dependent packages in.
You only have to look at the profusion of perl and python packages to get a feel for how bad this can get. And perl and python scripts don't tend to suffer too much from scripts depending on a particular version of a package.
I wish debian luck with this one :D Mike