> 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
Any C/C++ project with even mild complexity has a good chance of being extremely difficult to build due to either missing libraries that have to be installed manually, system incompatibilities, or compiler issues.
Python has like 28 competing package managers and install options, half of which are deprecated or incompatible. I can't even run `pip install` at all anymore on Debian.
Even Rust, which is usually great and has modern packaging and built-in dependency management, often has issues building old projects due to breaking changes to the compiler.
All this is to try to say that I don't think this is some problem unique to JS at all - but rather a side effect of complex interconnected systems that change often.
A big reason Docker and containers in general became so popular was because it makes this problem a lot less difficult by bundling much of the environment into the container, and Docker is very much agnostic to the language and ecosystem running inside it.
One can argue that this decision should be revised by debian but you should not install packages on system python installation for working into projects. Always use virtual environment.
» pip3 install supervisor error: externally-managed-environment
× This environment is externally managed ╰─> To install Python packages system-wide, try apt install python3-xyz, where xyz is the package you are trying to install.
As far as I can understand, they did this on purpose to dissuade users from installing packages globally to avoid conflicts with other Python environments.
Anyway, I'm not trying to argue about if that decision is right or not - I just wanted to use it as an example for my case that the JS ecosystem isn't alone and may even be far from the worst when it comes to this kind of issue.
Python is different here because in many linux distributions, there are many tools that rely on you system python. Python unlike node is not limited (in practice) to web applications. that's why you have to be more careful. So while I understand you are using this as an example, I don't feel that your comparison is apple to an apple.
They may or may not be running Node.js specifically, but I believe that many Linux distributions, as well as Windows, include JavaScript code in core applications. I don't see this as particularly different, except that they might choose to assume a single standard system Python that is able to be modified by standard Python development, whereas I would rarely expect that to be the case with however each component chooses to execute JavaScript.
No, they're not. I'm talking about core apps and services that are essential to a functional operating system. This is exactly the same situation. The difference is choices made by the OS and language ecosystem about how to manage dependencies in various use-cases. It is an apples to oranges comparison because of those decisions and not because of the language.