node.js rpm and looking for an sponsor

[Matej Cepl]

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