[bug#53414] [PATCH] update Node LTS to 16.13.2

[Pierre Langlois]

Hi all,

Maxime Devos <maximedevos@telenet.be> writes:

> [[PGP Signed Part:Undecided]]
> Attila Lendvai schreef op vr 25-02-2022 om 13:09 [+0000]:
>> > Still, the latest LTS (v16) seems better to me since it is newer
>> > and will be
>> > supported for longer.
>> 
>> with packages like nodejs one often needs both older and newer
>> versions in
>> parallel to also be able to build projects that haven't been ported
>> to the new
>> nodejs.
>
> Ignoring bootstrapping, this does not seem to be the case so far in
> Guix -- the only results of "git grep -F \#\:node gnu" is
>
> # 7 lines
> gnu/packages/node.scm:     `(#:node ,node-bootstrap
>
> so it seems that, except for bootstrapping, a single version of 'node'
> suffices.

If I may shime in, I agree that it's best to have fewer versions of node
for Guix's own node packages, however for end-users I think it's a good
idea to provide multiple versions they can install.

I am not a web developper so if anybody knows better please correct me
:-), but I think it's common for a website projects to depend on a
specific supported LTS version of node.  For example, one time I
contributed to a project that recommended using a "node version manager"
script, https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm, to easily switch between node
versions for different project.  This script seems pretty popular, but
it downloads official binaries :-/, Guix provides much better tools to
do this by default.

So I'm thinking it might make Guix more appealing to web developpers if
we provided multiple versions of node, only the LTS releases though I'd
say. For nodejs applications packaged in Guix though, I agree we don't
want multiple versions.

Thanks,
Pierre

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