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The tragedy of running an old Node project

(abdisalan.com)
272 points abdisalan | 1 comments | 18 Nov 24 18:24 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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vessenes ◴[18 Nov 24 18:46 UTC] No.42175536[source]▶
This will always be an issue for the node community - it’s endemic to the JavaScript shipping / speed culture and the package management philosophy.

Go is much, much better on these terms, although not perfect.

I’d venture a guess that Perl 5 is outstanding here, although it’s been a few years since I tried to run an old Perl project. CPAN was dog slow, but other than that, everything worked first try.

I’d also bet Tcl is nearly perfect on the ‘try this 10 year old repo’ test

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1. mst ◴[19 Nov 24 09:24 UTC] No.42181469[source]▶
CPAN.pm is not the fastest, no, though it generally spends most of its time running each distribution's tests before installing it, which while it does have a certain "start the install and go for lunch" to it is an excellent canary for if something's changed underneath you *before* you end up having to go spelunking your own code.

App::cpanminus (cpanm) is noticeably lighter, App::cpm (cpm) does parallel builds and skips tests by default.

An approach I've become quite fond of is using cpm to install fast into the local::lib I'm actually going to use, then creating a scratch setup in /home/tmp or similar and running cpanm in that under tmux/abduco/etc. to do a second install that *does* run the tests so I have those results to refer to later but don't have to wait for them right now.

(if I ever write a cpan client of my own, it's going to have a mode where it does a cpm-like install process and then backgrounds a test running process that logs somewhere well known so this approach becomes a single command, but I keep getting distracted by other projects ;)