node != nodejs within Debian packages

[rgbkrk]

As part of resolving jupyter/nbviewer#196, (and jupyter/nbviewer#194), @ahmadia and I ended up finding out that Debian based Linux Distributions build the node binary as nodejs.

IPython nbconvert defaults to using node, which is actually ax25-node on Debian based systems. See relevant posting on the Debian mailing list for more.

This won't affect users of nvm (who provide node) or those who build from source. This will affect certain strains of Ubuntu (Saucy Salamander was what I used to test).

[rgbkrk]

ax25-node will typically produce no outputs:

root@qa01:/usr/share/nbviewer# echo 'hi' | node venv/src/ipython/IPython/nbconvert/filters/marked.js
root@qa01:/usr/share/nbviewer# echo 'hi' | nodejs venv/src/ipython/IPython/nbconvert/filters/marked.js
<p>hi</p>

[minrk]

Awesome.

[minrk]

Can we ignore the node case, and just prefer nodejs and fallback on node? I do not want to handle the case of a system that has node that is not nodejs, that is just not worth our time.

[ahmadia]

Can we ignore the node case, and just prefer nodejs and fallback on node? I do not want to handle the case of a system that has node that is not nodejs, that is just not worth our time.

+1

Relevant code is at bottom of IPython/nbconvert/filters/markdown.py

PR or do you want to handle this yourself?

[rgbkrk]

With the right arguments on a user that has ax25-node installed, this could be quite dangerous.

[minrk]

I'll do it right now.

[minrk]

#5202

[ahmadia]

Looks good. With regards to @rgbkrk, I don't know if IPython has a check_call facility, but if you pass node -v to nodejs, you get a version number back, and if you pass it to ax25-node, you get an error. That seems a safe way to check, if more work :/

[rgbkrk]

I think Min's fallback is great.

Since node <marked_path> will always be incorrect to ax25-node, this will be fine. Forgive my alarming "with carefully crafted arguments" statement.

I have yet to get ax25-node to give me anything but error codes (nothing back to STDOUT), even when using ? and --help.

I think I would need more configuration for me to start my amateur radio career tonight.