Source: libv8-3.14 Version: 3.14.5.8-8.1 Severity: wishlist Hi,
The version of libv8 currently in Debian unstable is very old. It would be nice to have a newer version that works on arm64 so all the dependencies could be built and tested. Obviously you don't want lots of different versions of libv8 in Debian. I looked into the matter a little and am putting what I discovered below in case anyone finds it useful. V8's repo is here: https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8 You can see from the ChangeLog that there is a new version X.Y, with useful but incompatible changes, roughly every 6 weeks. It's currently on 4.5.2. Debian's current package is apparently based on "2012-10-22: Version 3.14.5". The first mention of "ARM64" in the ChangeLog is at "2014-03-24: Version 3.25.23". The main user of libv8 in Debian is nodejs, and that presumably explains why Jessie has libv8-3.14 rather than any other version. Node.js's repo is here: https://github.com/joyent/node Node.js includes its own copy of V8 in deps/v8/. Node.js's ChangeLog gives an idea of which versions of V8 correspond to which versions of Node.js. The Debian packages built from nodejs depend on the packages built from libv8-3.14: Debian does not include a separate version of V8 for use by Node.js, though there is, I think, a separate version of V8 bundled with Chrome. Debian's nodejs is currently based on 0.10.38, the latest, and perhaps last, 0.10 release. According to the ChangeLog, Node.js 0.10 was always based on V8 3.14: 0.10.0 is dated 2013.03.11, and 0.10.38 is dated 2015.03.23. So Node.js was using V8 3.14.5 29 months after upstream had finished with it. You can see in Node.js's ChangeLog how various fixes had to be backported. Node.js uses the odd-even convention, so 0.11 is unstable. Node.js's 0.12.0 is dated 2015.02.06, and the latest is 0.12.3, dated 2015.05.13. These are all based on V8 3.28.x. Moreover, I read here (https://github.com/joyent/node/issues/9162) that "V8 won't be upgraded past 3.28 for v0.12 because it requires a C++11 capable compiler". So I would guess that if Debian wants to continue having nodejs based on a separate libv8 package then the thing to do is add a libv8-3.28 package and then upgrade nodejs to 0.12.something. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
