v8 JavaScript in Fedora Maintenance
Problem scope
V8[1] is a standalone JIT-compiling JavaScript engine originating from Google Chrome[2] browser and currently used by various other projects, most notably Chromium[3] browser, node.js[4] runtime and various higher language bindings (Perl, ...).
Upstream releases very quickly, keeping neither stable nor versioned ABI or API, which makes it painful for distributions such as Fedora to maintain a consistent v8 runtime environment during the release lifecycle (different versions of higher-level components may require different versions of v8). Also, upstream provides no support for older releases, which leaves maintenance of releases that distributions sticked to distribution maintainers. Apart from bug fixes, backporting security patches needs to be done by distribution maintainers.
Status
| Release | v8 version | Chromium (not in Fedora) | node.js (not in Fedora) | Notes (fixes applied, known problems) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fedora 14 | ||||
| Fedora 15 (Rawhide) | ||||
| EPEL 6 |
Policies
Very rough idea here [5] TDB: How do we decide/coordinate on which version to ship?
Dependent packages
TODO
- What do other distributions do? Debian ships this