nodejs on Fedora 19

[T.C. Hollingsworth]

On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 10:05 PM, Roger <arelem at bigpond.com> wrote:
> I yum removed nodejs which removed all v8 s as well
> then yum installed nodejs which installed Package v8.x86_64
> 1:3.14.5.10-1.fc19
>
> Rails requires nodejs which requires v8.

Huh?  A `yum install rubygem-rails` does not drag in nodejs.

I'm curious as to what does; it probably should be using rubygem-execjs instead.

> v8 is buggy and will not update with sudo yum update
> Resolving Dependencies
> --> Running transaction check
> ---> Package v8.x86_64 1:3.14.5.10-1.fc19 will be updated
> --> Processing Dependency: v8 < 1:3.15 for package:
> nodejs-0.10.14-1.fc19.x86_64
> ---> Package v8.x86_64 1:3.17.6.14-2.fc19 will be an update
> --> Running transaction check
> ---> Package v8.i686 1:3.14.5.10-1.fc19 will be installed
> ---> Package v8.x86_64 1:3.14.5.10-1.fc19 will be updated
> --> Finished Dependency Resolution
> Error:  Multilib version problems found. This often means that the root
>        cause is something else and multilib version checking is just
>        pointing out that there is a problem.
>
> ...you can also use --setopt=protected_multilib=false to remove
>        this checking, however this is almost never the correct thing to
>        do as something else is very likely to go wrong (often causing
>        much more problems).
>
>        Protected multilib versions: 1:v8-3.17.6.14-2.fc19.x86_64 !=
> 1:v8-3.14.5.10-1.fc19.i686

The v8-3.17.6.14-2 package comes from spot's Chromium repository,
which unfortunately conflicts with the v8 in the main Fedora
repositories.  Chromium uses much newer versions of v8 that have
completely broken the API relied on by nodejs and binary extension
modules [1], so you can't use chromium and nodejs at the same time.
:-(

The fact that yum tries to drag in v8.i686 is a minor packaging bug
with nodejs.  The easiest way to work around it is to remove the
chromium repo, since no matter what I do you won't be able to install
chromium and nodejs at the same time.  Alternatively, this update [2]
should install cleanly in situations where the chromium repo is
enabled but chromium is *not* installed.

> 1:3.14.5.10-1.fc19 which seems to cause all the problems, even when
> installed.
>  yum check shows no errors.
>
> Only way I can update Fedora 19 is to yum update  --skip-broken sometimes
> and --exclude v8 other times.
> Seems messy
>
> What's the best way to resolve the v8 dilemma in these times of 4 cylinders
> or hybrids.
> thanks Roger

-T.C.

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nodejs/VlUJ68n6QBg/fPsuArtR0roJ
[2] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/nodejs-0.10.14-3.fc19