Investigate moving `nvm` into the foundation

[ljharb]

• What would be involved in moving https://github.com/creationix/nvm to the Node foundation?
• Is this something the foundation is interested in?
• Other than transferring the repo into the github org, what licensing, governance, CoC, TSC, etc changes would need to be explored?
• How would this affect the direction of nvm itself?
• are there any conflicts of interest, or messaging concerns, created by this project living in the foundation?

[MylesBorins]

Super +1 on this happening. I don't necessarily have answer to all of those questions but I believe that is the point of the incubation process.

[williamkapke]

I do not think the TSC is currently accepting applications for Mentorship/Incubation/TLPs at this time. See: #73 (comment) . But, I perhaps this is just to have a "what if" conversation without the formalities...

From what I understand, TLPs are something that has been determined to be "vital to the node ecosystem" and is at risk of becoming unstable without assistance. Express being a current example.

Maybe you can provide more context as to why the Node.js Foundation's resources & assistance are desired/needed?

are there any conflicts of interest, or messaging concerns, created by this project living in the foundation?

This would make it a "blessed" project which has been discussed & debated by the TSC before. I can't speak for all of the points of views on that- so someone else will need to elaborate on it.

[jasnell]

@williamkapke ... I'm not sure this is something that we would need to spin up too much process around... that is, I don't think we'd have to treat it as a top level project any more than we treat citgm as a top level project (for instance) or the docker-node stuff. It can simply be a tool that lives within the nodejs org.

the key question for me would be: are there other competing similar packages that would be disadvantaged by moving this into the org?

I think I'm +1 on this.

[Fishrock123]

I think we should ship a version manager. (But I'm pretty sure there are others who disagree.)

Or, at the very least, bundle one like we bundle npm.

I'm not sure that correlates to bringing an existing one into the foundation, and probably not at the current time.

[williamkapke]

ah. Rather than being a TLP, this would be something under the Core's domain... maybe...?

are there other competing similar packages that would be disadvantaged

I'll throw https://www.npmjs.com/package/n out there to be noted.

[jasnell]

If we bundled one I'd definitely want to bring it into the foundation first.
I've always found it mildly irritating that we don't already ship a version manager.

[MylesBorins]

The one advantage to nvm compared to most other node version managers is that it is implemented in POSIX. This has the disadvantage of not necessarily supporting windows, but it does make it very portable, and can run without having to have node installed first

With the windows ubuntu subsystem perhaps there is a way to get it working, as long as nvm is the only running in that subsystem to install node on the main system (as bash on windows is still not able to support npm).

[mikeal]

Even if it weren't bundled it would benefit from being more integrated into core development.

Does anyone know market share between nvm, n, and others node version managers?

[MylesBorins]

Doing some scientific research... please retweet

https://twitter.com/thealphanerd/status/725909274753261568

[jasnell]

according to numbers on npm...

nvm:

• 395 downloads in the last day
• 1,827 downloads in the last week
• 7,933 downloads in the last month

n:

• 7,379 downloads in the last day
• 48,944 downloads in the last week
• 197,293 downloads in the last month

[mikeal]

nvm isn't really installed by npm tho, so they won't have great data there.

[MylesBorins]

nvm is not generally downloaded by npm... @ljharb do you have the clone numbers from github?

[jasnell]

Yes, I know ;-) ... I'm adding to the market research, not providing all of it ;-)

[williamkapke]

https://www.npmjs.com/package/nvm doesn't have a valid link to the github repo which might turn people away.

[ljharb]

The one on npm is broken and from a legacy package - so none of its numbers are useful.

However, nvm is used on travis-ci for every single nodejs project, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it has more than 197K test runs in a month.