On Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 10:36 AM Michael Dawson <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Honza, correct.
>
> I was just trying to add that it's not just about consumption in RHEL 
> packages that use Node.js, but also customer applications and third party 
> applications that they might be running.
>
> On Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 6:35 AM Honza Horak <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Unless I interpret it wrong, you're saying that we actually need some 
>> flexibility in what /usr/bin/node means, which is the same thing I'm saying. 
>> Of course, the implementation of how to achieve this might change.
>>
>> Honza
>>
>> On Wed, Jul 12, 2023 at 4:34 PM Michael Dawson <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> My concern is the customer use case. They have installed a third party 
>>> application which will be expecting to use the name "node" versus one that 
>>> is tied to the version.  We want them to be able to easily use versions 
>>> which are not the default because the default Node.js for a RHEL release 
>>> will be EOL long before the version of RHEL is.
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jul 12, 2023 at 3:42 AM Honza Horak <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Sure. My current use case is preparing a nodejs v20 container image 
>>>> similar to previous versions at [1]. I want to use the latest stable 
>>>> fedora and explicitly want only nodejs v20 in the container (which is not 
>>>> the default one in F38).
>>>>
>>>> I also want to install nodejs-nodemon into the container to make the 
>>>> feature set to be on pair with previous versions, but that ends up with 
>>>> pulling nodejs 18 (the default) as well, because of the dependency on 
>>>> /usr/bin/node.
>>>>
>>>> Having different versions of packages like nodejs-nodemon in Fedora repos 
>>>> does not seem to be technically needed, one RPM build seems to be fine for 
>>>> more nodejs versions. I believe we did it the same in previous design with 
>>>> modules -- we only installed nodejs and npm from the module, but had 
>>>> nodejs-nodemon available in the repos in a single instance and it worked 
>>>> fine with all nodejs versions.
>>>>
>>>> Does that make more sense now? Maybe I'm trying to solve it too 
>>>> complicated, feel free to suggest any other solution.
>>>>
>>>> [1] https://github.com/sclorg/s2i-nodejs-container/
>>>>
>>>> Honza
>>>>

Sorry for the long silence on this; I've been swamped (and had PTO).

So, we have a number of competing requirements here:

1) Each Fedora release must have a default version of Node.js that is
pulled in when "nodejs" or "/usr/bin/node" is requested.
2) Fedora needs to be able to upgrade to a new release, possibly also
upgrading the default version of Node.js in the process.
3) Each Fedora release *may* have additional non-default Node.js
versions available in the repository.
4) Per packaging rules in Fedora, additional software that depends on
Node.js must either support the default version (using /usr/bin/node)
or it must modify its packaging to use a non-default path
(/usr/bin/nodejsNN). This is so that installing any particular package
(even if it requires a non-default Node version) does not preclude
installing the default version.

And now, from you:
5) It must be possible to reassign the symlink "/usr/bin/node" to a
non-default version (e.g. /usr/bin/node-18)


I explored this option 5) when I originally demodularized Node.js, but
it's *extremely* complicated. Not least because we have multiple
applications that are codependent, such as NPM. If we change
/usr/bin/node, we also need to change /usr/bin/npm (and npx, and...)
to match. Initially, I used the "alternatives" subsystem to accomplish
this, but it ran into quite a few unexpected issues. (The complete
discussion is elsewhere on the fedora-devel and nodejs lists. Look for
"Node.js repackaging" threads)

I'm not ruling out the possibility of a solution, but at least one of
the above constraints would have to go away. My recommendation is that
we document instead that the recommendation for creating a non-default
Node container is to manually add the desired symlinks. Maybe we
(Fedora) could just ship a container base image that does this for the
user?
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