The current implementation of alternative nodejs versions in a single
Fedora (say 38), is this:
* the main version (v18 in F38) ships /usr/bin/node
* alternative versions ship only /usr/bin/node-XX
Node modules packaged as RPM (e.g. nodejs-nodemon) then often include this
hard dependency: Requires: /usr/bin/node
Suppose I want to install only the alternative (non-default) version of
node and install a module nodejs-nodemon (that can run fine with any nodejs
version). I cannot do this at this point, because the nodejs-nodemon pulls
in the default node as a dependency.
New proposal: use a concept that has proofed to work for ruby for longer
time (except it's used for alternative implementations, rather than
alternative versions, but the logic is similar) -- rubypick package ships
/usr/bin/ruby that is actually a simple shell script. This script executes
a particular binary of ruby based on a reasonable defaults, explicit
parameters of environment variables.
How it would work for node:
The default nodejs version would ship a new sub-package called "nodepick",
which would only ship a couple of shell scripts: /usr/bin/node,
/usr/bin/npm, etc.. All nodejs versions (including the default one) would
only ship versioned binaries /usr/bin/node-XX. The shell scripts would
execute a particular versioned binary based on some reasonable logic
(environment variables, default, available version)...
From the RPM metadata perspective:
There would need to be some soft dependency from nodepick -> node-XX, with
priority for the default version (dnf honours priority by Suggests I
think), and a hard dependency of each of the nodejs-XX -> nodepick.
Thoughts?
Honza
