The tragedy of running an old Node project

(abdisalan.com)

272 points abdisalan | 2 comments | 18 Nov 24 18:24 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

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RadiozRadioz ◴[19 Nov 24 14:39 UTC] No.42183900[source]▶

I call this phenomenon "node rot". Judging by the comments here, it seems like a universal experience.

My favorite is the way that Python projects rot. Not only does Python's setuptools give you all the fun that node-gyp does, the common practice of versioning packages with packagename>=1.25.5 means you're almost guaranteed breakages as pip installs newer versions of packages than what the project was built with.

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1. gre ◴[19 Nov 24 15:21 UTC] No.42184392[source]▶

>>42183900 #

I just today tried reviving an old v12.4 node project and node-gyp is trying to use python2 which I don't even have on my Macbook anymore.

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2. ziml77 ◴[19 Nov 24 22:30 UTC] No.42188791[source]▶

>>42184392 (TP) #

That Python 2 crap hit me as well when working on an older project. It used node-sass which depended on node-gyp. Dealing with upgrading that was a pain because I had to upgrade so much more to get versions of everything that played nice together.

What really pissed me off about it was that Python 2 was already known to be nearing EOL when our project was started, so node-gyp should have been upgraded to work with Python 3 by then. And even more annoying was that node-gyp already had Node to run on, so why in the world was it coded to depend on Python at all!?

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