Re: Lots and lots of tiny node.js packages
Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> writes:
> On Wed, Nov 2, 2016 at 9:04 AM, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> If upstream themselves aggregates, then this works well. (See, for
>> instance, TeX Live, which is basically an upstream aggregation of
>> independently-released packages.) That gets its own version number and
>> its own unique existence and someone else is doing integration and
>> release management upstream of us and we can reuse some of their work.
>> But if we were going to do that, I think we would almost have to run a
>> separate TeX-Live-style project as an artificial upstream for Debian
>> packaging and do all the work that the TeX Live folks do to assemble
>> that distribution. And that's even *more* work than the Node packagers
>> are already putting in, of somewhat dubious benefit (since it would
>> only be to reduce package metadata).
> Personally I think that even upstream aggregation on the scale of
> XFree86 or TeX Live is annoying and I prefer the more fine-grained
> packaging of Xorg, GNOME etc.
Yeah, I think it was a huge win all around when X upstream got rid of the
monolithic tree and packaged all of the components separately.
TeX Live works well, but that's partly because TeX is quite stable.
> The web ecosystem is still changing rapidly, with WebAssembly coming
> soon, so probably things are going to look very different for the
> Debian buster development cycle.
Indeed.
I do think the Node community takes this too far, with way too many
micropackages that should just be part of the standard library. But,
well, it works for them, and it's not a totally unreasonable way to handle
things. I think Debian should find ways to stay flexible and adjust and
incorporate those sorts of philosophies about the reusable unit of code.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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