Comment by jessaustin
11 years ago
Yeah I'm sure it sucks for distro packagers. Why are they using npm, though? It's not designed for their use case.
Actually though you're just talking about some bugs in X, or possibly some design flaws in Y. Passing [EDIT, because bare objects are fine:] class instances around like that is the real code smell. So much coupling, so little cohesion. We call them "modules" because we like modularity.
It's not that packagers are using npm. It's that they might want to package a node application for their distro's package system, and now they have to sift through thousands of npm packages (already a nightmare). They can't just make a system package for every npm package, not just because that would violate packaging guidelines for any reasonable distro, but because one project can pull in multiple versions of a single package. The Nix and Guix crews can handle that (and that they can is as much of a bug as it is a feature).
There is no clean way of packaging a typical node application.
Passing class instances around like that is the real code smell.
Often, yes, but not always. Allowing fine-grained control over performance is one good reason that a library might expose class instances from one of its dependencies.
Is Node.js itself appropriate for packaging? I think maybe not. It changes really quickly, and has done for some time. Anyone coding in Node installs the particular versions she needs without regard to the distro. Most Node modules are just libraries installed in and for particular projects. There are tools written in node, but for the most part they focus on coding-related tasks that also tie them to particular projects, e.g. beefy or gulp. There's no need to install such tools above the project level, and certainly no reason to install them on the system level.
A distro that still packages python 2 (i.e. all of them) has a particular "velocity", and therefore it has no business packaging Node or anything written in it. Maybe a distro could package TJ's "n" tool (helpfully, that's written in bash rather than node), which would actually be handy for distro users who also use Node, but that's it.
I'm not talking about packaging node libraries for developers. No node developers are going to use system packages to install their libraries. What I mean is packaging applications written in node for end users.
For example, you can install Wordpress on Arch with `pacman -S wordpress' and you'll have a managed wordpress installation in /usr/share/webapps/wordpress. Then you just edit some wordpress config files, set up your http server to serve php from that directory, and you have a wordpress blog.
It would be nice to be able to do the same with Ghost.
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