[Discuss] node.js and npm on Debian?

[smallm at sdf.org (Mike Small)]

Dan Ritter <dsr at randomstring.org> writes:

> On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 10:51:41AM -0800, Rich Braun wrote:
>> Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> asks:
>> > But I can't figure out how to install npm. When I search for
>> > installation instructions they all seem to want me to pipe a curl
>> > command into a sudo bash. Huh? That's scary as hell.
>> 
>> Let others do the installation for you: my go-to technology for this is
>> Docker. First get docker installed
>
> And transfers those headaches to your security and ops teams.
>

Would Nix or Guix (run from within Debian -- guessing the former would
be more likely to have npm) be a better substitute? This was one of the
issues mentioned against things like Docker when we had that Guix talk a
couple years back. I have no first hand experience myself, only curious.

In fact I started to try to install Guix this weekend and ran into the
issue that Stretch doesn't have gnutls's guile bindings. I looked at the
history there, and it seems some gnutls and guile test failed. The Guix
maintainer, who also is a big guile hacker, looked at it and it appeared
to be something deep in garbage collection, so I have no harsh words for
debian -- they did what they day to do. But it was a little fustrating,
given I'd finally gotten around to actually wanting to try guix after
noticing CLISP didn't make Stretch due to a little slip up not fixing
something in time for the release. So maybe that's how it is with
Debian? You either have Woody/Sarge-like release cycles or you have
releases missing certain things.

(It does look like it will be simple enough for me to make a local
version of gnutls with guile-gnutls, except last I was at it I hit some
issue in dh_makeshlibs I don't understand yet. Is there an easier to
understand reference to shlibs in regards to debian packaging than their
policy document?)

-- 
Mike Small
smallm at sdf.org