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The tragedy of running an old Node project

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Re: The tragedy of running an old Node project

#181

Post by authorfly »

WD-42 wrote: post #78
mvkel wrote: post #23

> time to run it after not touching it for 4 years > Two hours of my life gone... Two hours of work after 4 years sounds ... perfectly acceptable? And it would have run perfectly right away if the node version was specified, so a good learning, too This feels like making a mountain out of a mole hill

Which is fine until your host doesn’t support older versions of node. I just got burned by an old js (vue 2) project. I ended up re writing it using good old ssr in Django with htmx and alpine when necessary. Now it’ll run until the end of time. It doesn’t even have a build step.

I sympathize with you, I had one too. Luckily it was small.

It seems luck of the draw. My old React projects (old as in 2018) still work great with class components. I guess the Vue guy did say he would be more revolutionary, when he launched it.

Re: The tragedy of running an old Node project

#182

Post by jollyllama »

For sure. This is the number one reason I am switching as many projects as I can to HTMX.

https://dubroy.com/blog/cold-blooded-software/

Sibling comments say in so many words, it's no big deal bro, just update. But it is a big deal over time if you have dozens of cold-blooded projects to deal with.

Re: The tragedy of running an old Node project

#183

Post by authorfly »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #67
uludag wrote: post #14

The worst part isn't just that it's nearly impossible to run/update an outdated JS project, but that this process will repeat itself ad infinitum. On the flip side, anything that uses vanilla JS without a build will most likely run just fine, probably till the end of human civilization.

YMMV but I had a 4 year old project whose only dependencies were socketio and express and it booted right up. So stick to stable, mature projects and you're likely to be fine.

Just watch out because socketio must be version matched for client-server or you will get the most annoying errors and state inconsistencies in the world. That's a scary production update let me tell you. Version 2.3.0 still scares me to this day after trying to upgrade that without production downtime.

Re: The tragedy of running an old Node project

#184

Post by kimi »

watsocd wrote: post #77
kamma4434 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect most Java projects from 20 years ago to compile and run with zero issues.

Absolutely not. Not on the client side anyway. I know of one application by a large multinational that requires java in the browser to run. Almost impossible to run now because of security restrictions.

We do have some very old and likely lost all sources "client apps" that are a single JAR and date from around 2003-2004, written in Swing. They still work.

Of course when they stop working they will be phased out, but we have been expecting their death for years now and not happening yet.

Re: The tragedy of running an old Node project

#186

Post by j1elo »

regularfry wrote: post #122
Ameo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No that does not work either. You get an error like this: » pip3 install supervisor error: externally-managed-environment × This environment is externally managed ╰─> To install Python packages system-wide, try apt install python3-xyz, where xyz is the package you are trying to install. As far as I can understand, they did this on purpose to dissuade users from installing packages globally to avoid conflicts with oth…

My slightly heretical opinion is that Debian would have been better off removing system pip entirely. The system python is for the system.

My not so heretical opinion is that PIP should behave like NPM by default, and work under a local environment subdirectory, just like "npm install" already creates a "node_modules" directory where to put all files, without the user needing to specify how and where and which env tool to use.

Re: The tragedy of running an old Node project

#187

Post by vulcan01 »

mst wrote: post #135
swiftcoder wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming you actually committed the lockfile...

Never underestimate the potential of past-you to have accidentally missed a tiny but essential step in a way that won't have made a noticeable difference at the time, yeah.

This is why Nix (with flakes), in a git repository, will refuse to use a lockfile that isn't being tracked by git.

Re: The tragedy of running an old Node project

#188

Post by [deleted] »

ohthatsnotright wrote: post #160
pzmarzly wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for you, my experience with Jekyll is closer to OP's experience with Node. I have a big website that I built in 2014, with tons of custom plugins, that is now stuck on Jekyll 2.x and Ruby 2.x, and has a ton of hidden C++ dependencies. The way I build it now is using a Dockerfile with Ubuntu 18.04. I probably could update it given enough effort, but I was rather thinking of rewriting it in Astro.js or Next.js.

If you're looking for a stable target you should not even consider Next.

[deleted]

Re: The tragedy of running an old Node project

#189

Post by demosthanos »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #179
mvkel wrote: post #23

> time to run it after not touching it for 4 years > Two hours of my life gone... Two hours of work after 4 years sounds ... perfectly acceptable? And it would have run perfectly right away if the node version was specified, so a good learning, too This feels like making a mountain out of a mole hill

I still can open my decade-old Java projects, run build with modern Maven/JDK and get working code - in a few minutes. Two hours of dancing with a drum doesn’t feel acceptable to me.

Maven, maybe, but Gradle absolutely not. If you don't have the exact version of Gradle that you used before, you're in for the same kind of misery documented above, with the same end state: just stick to the old version and deal with the upgrade later.

Re: The tragedy of running an old Node project

#190

Post by demosthanos »

treflop wrote: post #114
Ameo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What ecosystem are you comparing to? Any C/C++ project with even mild complexity has a good chance of being extremely difficult to build due to either missing libraries that have to be installed manually, system incompatibilities, or compiler issues. Python has like 28 competing package managers and install options, half of which are deprecated or incompatible. I can't even run `pip install` at all anymore on Debian.…

Java has a great ecosystem. It’s well thought out and I can compile and run 10 year old projects no problem. In fact, I wish everyone had just copied Java’s model instead of inventing their own worse model. I love Python but it has a terrible package ecosystem with mediocre tooling that has only gotten worse with time. JavaScript has gotten better but it seems they are just re-learning things that were long figured o…

In JetBrains's Developer Ecosystem 2023 survey, 50% of developers were still regularly working in Java 8 [0]—the exact kind of "stick with the old version of the runtime" solution described in TFA.

[0] https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/java/

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