The Debian stable model of having a distro handle common dependencies with a full system upgrade every few years looks more and more sane as years pass.

It's a shame some ecosystems move waaay too fast, or don't have a good story for having distro-specific packages. For example, I don't think there are Node.js libraries packaged for Debian that allow you to install them from apt and use it in projects. I might be wrong.

▲ noosphr 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Never mistake motion for action.

An eco system moving too quickly, when it isn't being fundamentally changed, isn't a sign of a healthy ecosystem, but of a pathological one.

No one can think that js has progressed substantially in the last three years, yet trying to build any project three years old without updates is so hard a rewrite is a reasonable solution.

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gr4vityWall 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> No one can think that js has progressed substantially in the last three years

Are we talking about the language, or the wider ecosystem?

If the latter, I think a lot of people would disagree. Bun is about three years old.

Other significant changes are Node.js being able to run TypeScript files without any optional flags, or being able to use require on ES Modules. I see positive changes in the ecosystem in recent years.

	▲	noosphr 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That is motion not action. The point of javascript is to display websites in the browser. Ask yourself, in the last three years has there been a substantial improvement in the way you access websites? Or have they gotten even slower, buggier and more annoying to deal with?

▲ embedding-shape 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> For example, I don't think there are Node.js libraries packaged for Debian that allow you to install them from apt and use it in projects

Web search shows some: https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=node&searchon=na... (but also shows "for optimizing reasons some results might have been suppressed" so might not be all)

Although probably different from other distros, Arch for example seems to have none.

▲ o11c 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Locally, you can do:

  apt-cache showpkg 'node-*' | grep ^Package:

which returns 4155 results, though 727 of them are type packages.

Using these in commonjs code is trivial; they are automatically found by `require`. Unfortunately, system-installed packages are yet another casualty of the ESM transition ... there are ways to make it work but it's not automatic like it used to be.

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9dev 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Unfortunately, system-installed packages are yet another casualty of the ESM transition ...

A small price to pay for the abundant benefits ESM brings.

	▲	o11c 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Honestly, I don't see the value gain, given how many other problems the JS tooling has (even ignoring the ecosystem). In particular, the fact that Typescript makes it very difficult to write a project that uses both browser-specific and node-specific functionality is particularly damning.

▲ kykat 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It is possible to work with rust, using debian repositories as the only source.

▲ mkoubaa an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The stable model usually implies that your app has to target both the old and the new distro version for a while. That is a bit too much to ask for some, unfortunately