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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: 0.274s | source
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mvkel ◴[18 Nov 24 19:03 UTC] No.42175730[source]▶
> time to run it after not touching it for 4 years

> Two hours of my life gone...

Two hours of work after 4 years sounds ... perfectly acceptable?

And it would have run perfectly right away if the node version was specified, so a good learning, too

This feels like making a mountain out of a mole hill

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arp242 ◴[18 Nov 24 19:53 UTC] No.42176217[source]▶
Well, the "solution" ended up as "I gave up and just installed an old Node version and called it a day". So those 2 hours weren't even enough.

I've been using Jekyll/Ruby since 2014 for my website, with a few custom plugins I wrote myself. And I've never really needed to do anything like this. It "just works".

My Go and C programs are the same: "just works". I have some that are close to a decade old.

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pzmarzly ◴[19 Nov 24 09:01 UTC] No.42181328[source]▶
Good for you, my experience with Jekyll is closer to OP's experience with Node. I have a big website that I built in 2014, with tons of custom plugins, that is now stuck on Jekyll 2.x and Ruby 2.x, and has a ton of hidden C++ dependencies. The way I build it now is using a Dockerfile with Ubuntu 18.04. I probably could update it given enough effort, but I was rather thinking of rewriting it in Astro.js or Next.js.
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1. rahoulb ◴[19 Nov 24 09:30 UTC] No.42181523[source]▶
This is the issue I have with the "build vs buy (or import)" aspect of today's programming.

There are countless gems, libraries or packages out there that make your life easier and development so much faster.

But software (in my experience) always lives longer than you expect it to, so you need to be sure that your dependencies will be maintained for that lifetime (or have enough time to do the maintenance or plug in the replacements yourself).