On: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?

[adrusi]

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.

[jessaustin → adrusi]

Ghost may be a special case. I wasn't familiar with it, but I just attempted to install in an empty directory without success. The first time I ran "npm i ghost", with node v5.9, it went into an infinite loop creating deeper and deeper ".staging/ghost-abc123/node_modules/" sub-directories of node_modules, which seems an... odd thing to do. After killing that, I noticed that they recommend Node LTS. Fair enough. I ran "sudo n lts", then "npm i ghost" again. This time, I didn't have to kill it because the preinstall script errored out. Based on the log, this script is installing semver, then requiring a file that can't possibly exist at preinstall time. Both of those are obnoxious, but at least it's possible to install semver.

I'm sure if I look hard enough there are some silly idiosyncratic steps one might take to install this module. Suffice it to say that it's not installing the "npm way", so it's misguided to blame npm for packaging difficulties.

More generally, I can certainly understand distro packagers' refusal to recreate towering pyramids of node dependencies in their own package system. Some lines have to be drawn somewhere, and "major" modules must bundle many of their dependencies when packaged for distros. If module maintainers don't do this, and distro packagers can't, then the modules can't be packaged.