What to do with the 'leveldb' package in npm

[rvagg]

The current owner of the leveldb package in npm has agreed to let us take it over, we just need to figure out what we want to put there: my8bird/node-leveldb#52. Note that the current leveldb package isn't very happy with newer releases of Node, and certainly not 0.11 which is a major pain for any native addon to support.

The only caveat is that we just bump the major version so the existing code can be left intact.

Some (non-exhaustive) options:

• Publish the current level package as leveldb
• Publish leveldown as leveldb
• Create something new that wraps leveldown to make something that behaves closer to the LevelDB API (I'm not sure what this would look like, LevelDOWN probably is that thing already)

Thoughts?

One additional thought from me is that as far as I know, what the current leveldb package does that we don't support is:

• Explicit snapshots
• Synchronous operations

While I'm not particularly in favour of adding the latter, I think we really should get to work on getting snapshotting in, it's the big missing thing and while it's not something we have people begging for, it might open up some interesting new experiments!

[dominictarr]

and seek on iterators - we have munged it into one directional streams.

[mcollina]

👍 for releasing leveldown as leveldb.
👎 for sync operations.

[huan]

Today I run into this issue in sudden because I'm wondering about who is using the leveldb npm name.

It would be really nice to rename leveldown to leveldb because it will be a clearer name and prevent confusing new comers who want to use leveldb.

[vweevers]

That can cause confusion too. The main package for newcomers is level, rather than leveldown by itself.

I like the current symmetry with other *downs. Instead of renaming, there's always room for improvement in the documentation, to explain the concept of up + down = level and to point people in the right direction.

And in general, unless there's a legal reason, I strongly dislike renaming a package with this age. It cuts the historical record in half.

[vweevers]

For the considerable future, the answer to "What to do with the 'leveldb' package" is "nothing".