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Comment by parshap | Hacker News Reader

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parshap·

> For example, if I try Node.js, I do not want the version of last year, but the latest.

http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?O=0&K=nodejs&d...

That is not a very impressive list.

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The latest stable version of Node.js is available in the official Community repo: http://www.archlinux.org/packages/?q=nodejs

I'm not a node person, but isn't that exactly what you want? There's node and npm. You install those two and then get everything else via npm.

The package name (nodejs-git 20110613-1) confused me. I assumed it was a snapshot from 2011-06-13, but after looking at the PKGBUILD file I see that it is cloning the github repo. My mistake.

fwiw, aur packages with the -(cvs|hg|git|svn) suffix usually track the development, while the date actually refers to when the build was last updated. Installing the package will actually give you today's date as the version tag. I can see why the confusion happens, though :)

As a new Arch user, this is really useful info. I too was confused by this and I've been avoiding packages with names like these.

Hm, as a general rule, I'd actually suggest continuing to avoid such packages in general, unless you know that they're what you need: you need to track whether there's been a source code update, whether someone broke the upstream build, whether your current versions of other packages depend on it

(example: x264-git, pretty much requires that you also install libav-git/mplayer-git, and then of course blender doesn't work, and so on. It can become quite messy at times.)

Node.js have a packet manager (npm), so I guess not so much developers bothers to make a PKGBUILD for a module.

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