Wait! Just like yesterday when I was accepted as an Outreachy intern and the first half of the internship is finished😲. How time flies when you are having a good time🎃

As part of the requirements for the final application during the contribution period for the Outreachy internship, I needed to provide a timeline to achieve our goal on my outreachy task which is transitioning of dependencies in node16 and webpack5. Having consulted my mentors who implied that the packages depending on webpack and nodejs combined are so numerous that its impossible to finish all within a space of three months but we have steps to guide us through the entire process to achieve most of our goals which are ➡

• Find a list of packages(failing rebuild and testing with autopkgtest, of reverse dependencies of webpack and nodejs) to fix.
• See if new upstream versions are available that support nodejs16 and webpack5 respectively.
• See if the new upstream version works and doesn't fail while rebuilding or testing with autopkgtest.
• Report bug 🐞 in Debian if any fails to rebuild or test with autopkgtest.
• Forward bugs upstream if needed.
• Fix packages and forward patches.

As of this writing(though a little late🕔) we have successfully rebuilt all reverse dependencies of webpack5 and split them equally each for I and my co-intern for all Javascript modules as ruby💎 packages also depend on webpack which is a total of 44 packages. Filed a bug report on Debian bug tracking system for failing packages, also the original maintainer or uploader of the package to the Debian archive mostly Debian developers also get a mail in references to the package bug 🐞report. Sometimes the uploader who also receives the bug report decides to help out to fix the package and forward the patch upstream if need be. We have also filed an issue to upstream repo mostly via github👆 where some respond and create PR to solve those errors and others are plain aversive to the whole idea. PR from the upstream developer is cherry-picked and a patch is created by us to incorporate the code into our own working repository. some package upstream maintainer rejects such issues or doesn't respond, we take it upon ourselves to fix the package. The total number of packages that are successfully updated and ready to be merged is 10 packages while 12 packages remain on my own end to be updated.

One of the most challenging packages to update so far was prop-type as its runs its large test suite using jest of a lower version 19.0.2 compared to that of Debian OS which is version 27.5.1 updating and migrating its API's and methods to use the Debian updated version is so challenging after several googling, testing out the solution from StackOverflow, trials, and errors, reading documentations we eventually made progress with the help of my mentor, co-intern and the whole community member. It's so crazy that when I got it working I said to myself. phew😅😌 it's not rocket science why can I figure it out sooner than expected🤷‍♀️

I initially proposed that I would be halfway done with the project by now, I guess the reason am not able to achieve some of our goals which are finishing up with the packages for webpack and moving to transition some of the nodejs packages at all is DEBUGGING. Yes DEBUGGING! where you never can predict what the solution is. is the problem coming from Debian? or dependencies of the package you are working on, upstream bug, or dependencies of dependencies of the package you are working on, so many questions to answer. You can't easily find a solution to a bug as it takes time to try out so many guesses more of an educated guess, or even try out all the solutions from stack overflow and still no viable progress. Obviously, you cannot really know about something to set up a plan for unless you get right into it.

One way of doing this, if I have to start again is the truly understand how the javascript package work under the hood, how its handles different interaction between packages, some of its dos and don't of transpiling, bundling, testing, e.t.c

I guess my unrealistic goals need to be modified because some drawback that was not envisaged popped up and I underestimated the complexity of the tasks, which will be reducing the number of packages to update in transitioning of nodejs from what I planned😢

My major focus for the second half of the internship is to fix bugs and errors I discover, file bug reports for future bugs to seek help from co-maintainer or developers, file issues upstream and close those whose bugs are already resolved for the remaining 12 packages, and ultimately successfully uploading all reverse dependencies. Also diving into transitioning of nodejs16.

Thanks for stopping by🙏