node vs nodejs on Debian Jessie

[Jim Campbell]

The currently-supported Debian platform is Debian Wheezy, but Debian Jessie will be out soon, so I attempted a test install on Jessie. If we do not intend to support Debian Jessie for the 0.8 release, this issue can be pushed-back to the 0.9 release.

The issue is that the ./bin/bootstrap.sh . . . && make step fails due to a naming change in Debian / Ubuntu, whereby "node" is now packaged as "nodejs". See here for more details on that change: ​http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18130164/nodejs-vs-node-on-ubuntu-12-04

Creating a symlink between /usr/bin/nodejs and /usr/bin/node allows the bootstrap process to proceed, so it isn't really a problem with the overall program / code.

Perhaps, as part of the bootstrap step, we should check to see if "node" works, and (if not) try "nodejs", and if that doesn't work, say that the step failed.

The existing setup / code which looks for "node" does work on Fedora 21 installs, though, so I don't think that we can just flat-out switch from looking for "node" to looking for "nodejs".

As a final comment, I'm not at a computer where I would have access to the actual error message, but hopefully what I've provided is enough information. Thanks.

[Jim Campbell]

We now include the 'nodejs-legacy' package in the list of packages to install on Debian-based systems. So, this issue is fixed with commit: ef2642f7bba3dd61ec2a0b2a2e3a8237e7d9dd1e

See the commit message for further details. : )