Why is nvm not packaged in the ubuntu repositories?

Question

$ sudo apt-get install nvm
…
E: Unable to locate package nvm

Installation instructions usually involve running random scripts from GitHub (curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.11.1/install.sh | bash), instead of using the well-known apt-get, yum or equivalent for other distributions.

Why isn't nvm packaged for Ubuntu?

I guess there must be a technical reason since nvm is a common piece of software, like a licensing issue or something like this, so I'm curious to know why it cannot be packaged. I searched online for a package and for a reason, but didn't get any useful result.

Never heard of nvm. Feel free to become a package maintainer if you so desire, make a ppa — Panther, Jul 11 '17 at 19:17
For packaging see https://askubuntu.com/questions/279686/how-to-package-a-simple-bash-script — Panther, Jul 11 '17 at 20:05

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 11 '17 at 19:58

5

As per https://github.com/creationix/nvm/issues/761, it seems that the author(s) of nvm (the Node.JS Version Manager) strongly opposes to packaging nvm using distribution's standard package management tools, and prefer to roll their own solution.

This most likely didn't motivate people to package the tool.

answered Jul 11 '17 at 19:58

Suzanne Soy

453

Upstream does not want to package, and I don't blame them to be honest. I think it would be rather trivial to package if you were interested, a ppa would be trivial to maintain. – Panther Jul 11 '17 at 20:01
3

I do blame them, it means that instead of doing a standard sudo apt install … … a dozen pieces of software … … …, if everyone does this then what would take 1 minute to install a dozen applications becomes on average 10+ minutes of searching online for a package that doesn't exist and trying to find the installation steps, for each piece of software :-( . Welcome back to the Windows era of search + download on dubious sites + click next next next next next. – Suzanne Soy Jul 11 '21 at 23:26
I'd like to second that: I do blame them as well. In addition to the point made above, getting packages from a distribution is a thousand times safer than downloading from the internet, where any number of intermediate hops may be compromised. A system like apt, yum, dnf or whatever will reliably check digital signatures. Piping a script through bash won't. – antimeme Jul 30 '22 at 18:53

Why is nvm not packaged in the ubuntu repositories?

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