[Discuss] node.js and npm on Debian?

[Rich Braun]

Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> observed:
> ... it feels like we are doing something
> fundamentally wrong if a sensible way to write "Hello, World!" (or
> "Hello, I'm a GUI widget!") could possibly be: "Fire up a Linux
> VM.". (Or a Docker container...)
> ...(Slack) is over 80MB. (Tunein Radio) that has an install of 65MB.

The Alpine:3.7 container image is 2 megabytes. Most of the readily-launchable
images that I've set up using it are in the 8-25 megabyte range. Yes, bigger
than a local compiled binary. But they start up within a second or two, so by
comparison with virtualization or Amazon EC2, containerization wins big-time
against firing up something that takes 60 to 200 seconds.

Trying to support an organization of dozens or hundreds of developers'
laptops, and hundreds or thousands of server deployments, would be incredibly
difficult with last decade's tools like VMware or puppet (well, I know
puppet's got a loyal following, but as for me I'm done with it).

Supporting my home LAN with just a handful of machines became a lot easier
when I ditched all the config-management tools, created a
directory-of-directories of my various /etc configs, and mapped my containers
to those /etc settings files. I just edit a setting with trusty old emacs or
vi, commit to my local git, and re-start the container service.

Have been doing something kinda like this since before docker (circa 2012
there was just LXC; Ubuntu 12.04 had the first well-package containerization
tools set), but today there's a big developer community around the concept of
docker containers and major backing by such open-source sponsors as Netflix
and Red Hat.

Reducing bloat (while laudable) shouldn't be the primary goal; I try to go for
simplifying and accelerating workflow.

-rich