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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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dmuth ◴[19 Nov 24 14:48 UTC] No.42183995[source]▶
This is one reason why whenever I build a new project, I build it inside of a Docker container.

That way, the project has just the dependencies it needs, and I know I can rebuild it at some point in the future and will be unlikely to run into problems when I do.

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1. Cu3PO42 ◴[19 Nov 24 15:49 UTC] No.42184788[source]▶
This works as long as your Dockerfile is reasonably reproducible and does its best to lock dependencies. However, this approach has failed me a couple of times in the past. For example, I rebuilt a container some weeks later, in the meantime a new version of clang had been released that just so happened to break my build due to a bug.

I personally use Nix these days, but the complexity is too high for me to recommend it to everyone for every software project.

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2. danieldk ◴[19 Nov 24 19:53 UTC] No.42187408[source]▶
Yeah, Nix pretty much solves this problem. The other day I wanted to try a really old version of spaCy for fun/historic interest. spaCy 1.8.2 installed freshly from the binary cache on NixOS-unstable as if it was still April 2017.