Jonas Smedegaard <jonas@jones.dk> writes: > Hi Phil, > > Thanks for looking into this! > > Quoting Philip Hands (2017-01-06 12:53:10) >> Jérémy Lal <kapouer@melix.org> writes: >> >> > 2017-01-04 10:04 GMT+01:00 Andrey Rahmatullin <wrar@debian.org>: >> >> On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 09:54:34AM +0100, Jérémy Lal wrote: >> >>> i really think it would be best to have nodejs 6.9 in next debian release. >> >>> That version is currently in experimental and i was about to upload it >> >>> to unstable, but i tried to do things right and prepared the addons >> >>> that need to be rebuilt and binNMUed, then opened a transition bug >> >>> #849505. >> >>> No answer yet, people are busy, and the number of concerned packages >> >>> is low (a dozen or so), should i just rebuild and upload them myself ? >> >> The transition freeze was on Nov 5. >> > >> > This is not very smart - i'm talking about something that will make future >> > maintenance and security patches easier, something that is easy to do >> > and that i can even do alone. >> >> Your "This is not very smart" comment made me react fairly negatively at >> first reading. It's easy to assume bad things about the old version's >> stability reading that, although that's presumably not what you were >> saying. >> >> Having looked into it a little, I found this: >> >> https://github.com/nodejs/LTS >> >> which shows that the current packaged v4 packages will drop out of LTS >> in April, and out of maintenance a year later according to this: >> >> https://hackernoon.com/node-js-v6-transitions-to-lts-be7f18c17159 >> >> Version 6, which Jérémy is suggesting should be our stable release >> version, has been in LTS mode since October, and will be in LTS mode >> until Apr 2018, then maintenance (presumably until Apr 2019). >> >> I suspect that in a couple of years time, that Node.js programmers will >> not be that much more impressed with v6 than they will be with v4, since >> both will be astonishingly ancient, but at least v6 buys us an extra >> year of usefulness. > > Until this point I thought you would summarize with a suggestion that we > get v6 included in next stable Debian release (i.e. a plea to the > release team to make an exception from their general rules). > >> I suspect that it might be better for all concerned if we simply >> encouraged people to use this via backports from the start, to avoid the >> problem of fast-moving projects getting preserved in amber by Debian. > > Do I understand you correctly that you recommend that we all tell our > users - e.g. in release notes - something like this: "We acknowledge > that the Nodejs included in this release is outdated, and recommend that > you avoid it: Please instead subscribe to our snapshot repository and > use the newer (but lesser supported) version from there."? I wasn't going as far as recommending anything -- I was just trying to cover various aspects of this in the hope that we might then discuss the pros and cons of the choices available before the release rather than drifting into doing something that doesn't really suit anyone very well. I don't know enough about the implications of upgrading to have any strong opinions about what the best course of action might be. It just struck me that to have v4 enter Debian stable just at the point that it drops out of Node.js LTS is unlikely to be the optimal choice. Cheers, Phil. -- |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd. |-| http://www.hands.com/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/ |(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg, GERMANY
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