Ubiquity NG - was Re: ubiquity migrated to git

[Luke Faraone]

On Thu, 10 May 2018 at 11:30, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult <
info at metux.net> wrote:

> On 05.05.2018 08:15, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:

> Hi folks,

> > Third, we have Electron, which is the HTML5 app framework used by world
> class app developers. Skype, Spotify and a ton of GREAT apps on
> Ubuntu> are Electron apps.
> […]

> Anyways, the whole nodejs stuff has always been really painful -
> especially if some native code is involved. Everything's just
> bleeding edge, no long term maintenance ... somewhere deep in these
> huge dependency chains, something always breaks. Even worse: it often
> starts downloading binaries (that tend to be incompatible w/ the host),
> calls the wrong compiler w/ wrong flags, etc, etc, etc.

> Exactly the kind of stuff that I really can't have on production
> systems.

> A reasonable approach would require rewriting npm in a way that it
> takes modules from the system, helps in automatic debianization, so
> we can run everything though the usual deb toolchain and maintainers
> can easily patch whenever necessary. Certainly possible, but *a lot*
> of work to do, before we reach a reasonable stable state.

Technically, this already exists, and there are a large number of node-*
packages in Debian, at the very least:
https://wiki.debian.org/Javascript/Nodejs/Npm2Deb

I agree with your other points — supporting anything in the NodeJS
ecosystem in LTS releases is going to be incredibly challenging, and I
worry that something like Electron is too much complexity for the benefit,
as long as we're sticking to our packaging policies.

-- 
Luke Faraone;; Debian & Ubuntu Developer; Sugar Labs; MIT SIPB
lfaraone on irc.[freenode,oftc].net -- https://luke.wf/ohhello
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