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Re:Let's Package JQuery: A JavaScript Packaging Dystopian No... by jamielinux on Saturday May 02, 2015 @03:05AM (#9476181)
T.C. and I worked on getting jQuery packaged for Fedora [1].

It's quite painful trying to package npm modules in a way that's suitable for distributions like Red Hat/Fedora/Debian. The dependency tree just goes on and on and on, and there are versioning issues all over the shop. And if you want to run test suites in the package build process then you'd better package mocha, tap, tape, nodeunit, should, vows, expresso, jasmine, supertest etc. And all of their dependencies too. And make sure every test in the test suites for every module pass. By the end of it all, you're a broken, hollow shell of the person you were before, but at least now it's possible to run "yum install js-jquery" and get version 2.1.3 :-)

[1]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/jQuery

Re:Let's Package JQuery: A JavaScript Packaging Dystopian No... by seanp2k2 on Saturday May 02, 2015 @04:19AM (#9476326)
Honest question, not trolling: why would I want to install a front-end JS lib using a system package manager? What is the use-case for doing this?
Re:Let's Package JQuery: A JavaScript Packaging Dystopian No... by icebraining on Saturday May 02, 2015 @05:24AM (#9476441)
Self-hosted web apps (the linked post mentions MediaGoblin). The idea is that a user can run 'apt-get/yum install mediagoblin' on his home computer and have a personal media server.
Re:Let's Package JQuery: A JavaScript Packaging Dystopian No... by davexunit on Saturday May 02, 2015 @08:41AM (#9476840)
Deduplication, reproducibility, using only a single package manager instead of a handful, ec.