New comment by paper42 on void-packages repository

https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/pull/42525#issuecomment-1450741967

Comment:
There are currently 2 nodejs packages:
* nodejs (currently 16)
* nodejs-lts (12) only used for building one package that I didn't manage to switch to nodejs yet

merging nodejs-lts and nodejs is done in this PR: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/pull/40106
updating nodejs to 18 is done in this PR: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/pull/41239

They can NOT be installed at the same time because they conflict, so all runtime dependencies have to be pointing to nodejs. I am trying to get rid of nodejs-lts, so that we can only have one nodejs package and everything will be easier to manage.

If I understand this PR right, you are trying to update nodejs-lts to 16 and use it for runtime dependencies of some packages and nodejs for runtime dependencies of others. This will not work, nodejs and nodejs-lts can not be installed together and so if we had for example element-desktop use nodejs-lts and  vscode use nodejs, people wouldn't be able to have both element and vscode installed at the same time. This is not acceptable.

You could technically only switch build dependencies and let runtime dependencies always be nodejs, but that's ugly and exactly the approach I am trying to avoid by removing nodejs-lts.

> I thought that updating the nodejs-lts to 16.19.1 and switching dependencies from nodejs to nodejs-lts , will save me from the hassle of testing every program depending on nodejs.

I tested builds of all nodejs packages in #41239 and #40106, so there is no need for that.

> we can at least make sure that hostmakedepends set to "nodejs-bin" instead of rebuilding (nodejs or nodejs-lts) which takes time to do .

I still don't understand what that's supposed to achieve. nodejs takes some time to build, yes, but that's not an issue. We are not trying to have more binary packages in repositories for no reason, They only work on some archs by design (and probably wouldn't even work on musl) which means the builds wouldn't even succeed.

> Aside from that, how about adding new packages (node.js-bin) so we will be able to use the latest stable version of node without breaking other packages, and I would like to maintain it as well. 

Again, that would conflict with the regular nodejs package, so there is no point to it. Also, why -bin?