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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: 0.2s | 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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ivan_gammel ◴[19 Nov 24 13:19 UTC] No.42183093[source]▶
I still can open my decade-old Java projects, run build with modern Maven/JDK and get working code - in a few minutes. Two hours of dancing with a drum doesn’t feel acceptable to me.
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demosthanos ◴[19 Nov 24 13:38 UTC] No.42183272[source]▶
Maven, maybe, but Gradle absolutely not. If you don't have the exact version of Gradle that you used before, you're in for the same kind of misery documented above, with the same end state: just stick to the old version and deal with the upgrade later.
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ivan_gammel ◴[19 Nov 24 13:59 UTC] No.42183488[source]▶
Well, I‘m not talking about Gradle, right? Sometimes conservative choice is what gets the job done.
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1. demosthanos ◴[19 Nov 24 14:03 UTC] No.42183533[source]▶
Right, I'm just clarifying for others who may not know the difference that Node doesn't have a monopoly on instability.

There are a very small number of projects that specifically make it their goal to be backwards-compatible effectively indefinitely, and Maven is one of those. It's part of what people who hate it hate about it, but for others it's the main selling point.