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Comment by o11c | Hacker News Reader

Mostly unrelated, but does anyone know how are you supposed to make path-less module specifiers work for Node if you are not using npm but rather system-installed JS packages (Debian etc. install node-* packages into /usr/share/nodejs/)? With `require` it just works, but with `import` it errors and suggests passing the absolute path (even though it clearly knows what path ...).

For some reason everybody in the JS world takes "download and execute random software from the Internet" as the only way to do things.

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Try import maps, something like:

    {
      "imports": {
        "express": "/usr/share/nodejs/express/index.js",
        "another-module": "/usr/share/nodejs/another-module/index.js"
      }
    }

Then run node like: `node --import-map=./import-map.json app.js`

The Debian approach of having global versions of libraries seems like it's solving a different problem than the ones I have. I want each application to track and version its own dependencies, so that upgrading a dependency for one doesn't break another, and so that I can go back to an old project and be reasonably confident it'll still work. That ultimately led me to nix.

I have a simpler solution to the latter problem: if upgrading a dependency package breaks anything (barring multi-year deprecation, limited-time experimental previews, etc.), I blacklist it and never install that package ever again. After all, they are clearly lacking on either their testing infrastructure or their development guidelines.

It's amazing how much the quality of installed software improves when you do this. Something our industry desperately needs.

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