[gentoo-dev] Re: Package up for half-grabs: net-libs/nodejs

[Marek Szuba]

On 2021-08-16 17:50, Joonas Niilola wrote:

> It'd help if you described the caveats that are to be expected.

I would say there are two:

1. Apart from from what comes out on the latest even branch (I would 
strongly advise against packaging odd branches if you value your sanity, 
except possibly right before the release of the next even branch to make 
sure all the Gentoo-specific patches apply and do what they're supposed 
to do - which is what we did with v15/v16) in its early days, almost all 
the new versions of Node.js are security releases. This implies quite a 
lot of stabilisation requests to keep track of, many of which will not 
even have been completely resolved when a new security release comes out.

2. The test suite is somewhat fragile. Some tests dislike the Portage 
sandbox, some of the more recent ones fail if executed in an 
unprivileged container, once in a while you will run into a failure 
caused by a combination of configure settings / build flags upstream has 
not thought about (at least said upstream is reasonably friendly and 
swift to respond to reported issues if you give them all the technical 
details), and once in a while there WILL be some user-reported test 
failure which you will never manage to reproduce until it has magically 
gone away for the user themselves come next release.

-- 
Marecki