On Wed, May 29, 2024 at 11:32 AM Stephen Gallagher sgallagh@redhat.com wrote:
tl;dr: I'll be stepping down from maintaining the nodejs22, nodejs20 and nodejs16 packages in Fedora, effective June 30, 2024. I will continue to maintain libuv.
It's been a hard decision to come to, but I think this is the correct decision for me. I've been effectively the sole maintainer of Node.js in Fedora for nearly a dozen years now (apparently, I landed the first official package in Fedora on Dec. 18, 2012). It has been a long, long road.
I first picked up Node.js because it was being added as a new dependency on a package I maintained at the time: Review Board (a Django-base code-review application). When I looked into it, I discovered that others had tried - and failed - to package Node.js previously, but Fedora's rules at the time were *very* strict with regards to carrying bundled software and Node.js upstream at the time had a build-system that pretty much only allowed bundling. It took quite a bit of effort to work through that, but we got there in the end and I was able to deliver Node.js 0.8 as the very first version to ship as part of Fedora. It's been a wild ride ever since.
For a long time, Fedora carried a single version of Node.js - whatever was the latest version destined for LTS status at the time that Fedora version would be released. Then, along came... Modularity. As you may know, I was heavily involved with the design of Modularity. Node.js in particular was something I viewed as a perfect consumer of this new packaging mechanism: it gave us the ability to ship all versions of Node.js in Fedora (not just the LTS ones) in a way that could be packaged in VMs and (new at the time) container images without needing to modify the way the applications were launched.
Sadly, as you probably know, the implementation of Modularity fell short of its lofty goals and has largely been relegated to the dust-bin of history. When it became clear that Modules were going to be dropped from Fedora, I took on another big packaging exercise: DE-modularizing Node.js. Rather than go back to the "single Node.js version in Fedora" approach, I moved to a hybrid approach where we would have a single "system" version of Node.js LTS like in the older style, but we would also package the older (and newer!) LTS releases in a non-default arrangement, similar to how Python packages are delivered in Fedora. I've been doing it this way for a few years now, and while there have been some bumps in the road around major-release upgrades, it's been overall quite workable.
Recently, the Node.js downstream maintainers made some additional improvements in Node.js 20 to unbundle some previously-precompiled WASM code into their own packages which build it properly. This is great! Unfortunately, it has introduced some new issues with the non-default version in the release (as many of you probably saw last week). We sorted this out by temporarily re-bundling the WASM in the non-default versions, but this is really a stop-gap solution.
It's not a huge issue, but it took a big chunk out of my week to get that resolved and in doing it, I came to an important realization: I'm burnt out. I took a moment to think through it and realized that I don't actually *use* Node.js anywhere anymore. I've been maintaining it for so long that it's become a habit, but I'm not a real consumer of it. I've sent requests in the past to fedora-devel asking for comaintainers, but I've never actually had anyone step up, so I've just kept going.
Thank you for all the work you've done on this, Stephen. Kudos to you for recognizing where you're at, and having the courage to share it.
So that brings us to today and my decision to step down. It's been a wild ride, but I need to step away and focus on other things. I hope someone out there will pop up and take over for me. I'm perfectly happy to train someone on how I maintain the various versions, but my time as a maintainer is coming to an end. I'll keep things going for another month, but after that it becomes Someone Else's Problem.
If you read this far, thanks for suffering through that rambling journey.
No, again, thank you.
josh