Upstream calls the binary itself yarn as yarnpkg appears to have been
deprecated. Packaging as yarnpkg for backwards-compatibility is understandable,
though I believe a symlink yarn -> yarnpkg should be added as tools and scripts
nowadays typically check only for yarn.

For example a problem occurs when installing GitLab from source, it only checks
for yarn during the rake task and complains it cannot be found. A local symlink
/usr/local/bin/yarn -> /usr/bin/yarnpkg resolved the issue.

(Alternatively, perhaps make yarn the primary installation and symlink the
legacy yarnpkg -> yarn.)

Thanks.

Hi Melvin,

thanks for raising this issue again.
We can't just symlink yarn to yarnpkg or rename yarnpkg -> yarn because there's a already a yarn binary in Debian, see:
https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=sid§ion=all&arch=any&searchon=contents&keywords=yarn

This was extensively debated in the IPT bug:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=843021#65
and the consensus at the time was that "our" yarn -was to ship only the yarnpkg binary

I still think it's confusing and I agree with you that it would be best to use the same name as upstream.

I propose to keep this bug open and wait to see what happens; ATM cmdtest is far more popular (as per popcon data) than yarnpkg ...

Paolo

Le Lundi, Septembre 16, 2019 16:02 CEST, Melvin Vermeeren <vermeeren@posteo.net> a écrit:

Debian has already a /usr/bin/yarn file given by cmdtest. cmdtest has a better "popcon" than yarnpkg, that's why we won't change this for now.

Cheers,
Xavier

Hi, I'm Maël, Yarn's lead maintainer.

While cmdtest has a popcon score higher than the yarn package, it's mostly
because Yarn isn't traditionally installed using the Debian package. For
historical reasons the 1.x branch always updated it, but in general our
users install Yarn using it's "competitor", npm. The npm numbers give a
very different picture: Yarn is downloaded 6.1m times per month.

There are currently talks to, potentially, ship symlinks for the three main
package managers along with Node (npm, which is already there, along with
Yarn and maybe pnpm). These plans aren't concrete yet, but a few people
think it's worth studying. In any case, the decision is expected to be
taken for Node 15, which will happen this year. To the extent possible, I
think it could be wise (and very appreciated!) to consider renaming the
`yarn` binary from `cmdtest` before it risks becoming an actual problem.

As a last note, I pinged Lars Wirzenius (who I think was the original
cmdtest maintainer?), back in March '19. He mentioned having recently
retired, but seemed fairly supportive of the idea ("I've now discussed the
name of our testing tool with its other developer and we will likely change
the name of our program during the Debian buster+1 development cycle").

Maël
vermeeren@posteo.net> a écrit:
understandable,
scripts
only checks
symlink
the
better "popcon" than yarnpkg, that's why we won't change this for now.

See below ...

Hi Maël,

thanks for the feedback and for your Debian contribution.

I've added here the info on the bug that has to be addressed by the cmdtest
maintainer (if he agrees) for us to be able to fix this one.

I'll also ping him.

Paolo

Hi all, is there any news on this one ? I mean is this will be fixed on
current stable version of debian or maybe the next one ?

About popcon score, I think it could have another bias as lot of tooling
using yarn search a yarn binary and not yarnpkg.  For example vue-cli
doesn't detect yarn with the debian package because of that. So we could
imagine that some users could remove this package or don't use it and
find another way to install yarn.  (Even if a simpler workaround exists
: ln -s /usr/bin/yarnpkg /usr/bin/yarn)

On Tue, 26 May 2020 20:04:22 +0200 Paolo Greppi <paolo.greppi@libpf.com>
wrote:
 > See below ...
 >
 > On Wed, 20 May 2020 18:08:29 +0200 =?UTF-8?Q?Ma=C3=ABl_Nison?=
<mael.nison@datadoghq.com> wrote:
 > > Hi, I'm Maël, Yarn's lead maintainer.
 > >
 > > While cmdtest has a popcon score higher than the yarn package, it's
mostly
 > > because Yarn isn't traditionally installed using the Debian
package. For
 > > historical reasons the 1.x branch always updated it, but in general our
 > > users install Yarn using it's "competitor", npm. The npm numbers give a
 > > very different picture: Yarn is downloaded 6.1m times per month.
 > >
 > > There are currently talks to, potentially, ship symlinks for the
three main
 > > package managers along with Node (npm, which is already there,
along with
 > > Yarn and maybe pnpm). These plans aren't concrete yet, but a few people
 > > think it's worth studying. In any case, the decision is expected to be
 > > taken for Node 15, which will happen this year. To the extent
possible, I
 > > think it could be wise (and very appreciated!) to consider renaming the
 > > `yarn` binary from `cmdtest` before it risks becoming an actual
problem.
 > >
 > > As a last note, I pinged Lars Wirzenius (who I think was the original
 > > cmdtest maintainer?), back in March '19. He mentioned having recently
 > > retired, but seemed fairly supportive of the idea ("I've now
discussed the
 > > name of our testing tool with its other developer and we will
likely change
 > > the name of our program during the Debian buster+1 development cycle").
 > >
 > > Maël
 >
 > Hi Maël,
 >
 > thanks for the feedback and for your Debian contribution.
 >
 > I've added here the info on the bug that has to be addressed by the
cmdtest
 > maintainer (if he agrees) for us to be able to fix this one.
 >
 > I'll also ping him.
 >
 > Paolo
 >
 >

Hello JavasScript people,
Hello Python people,


We both want to use /usr/bin/yarn for a program,
unfortunately different programs.

What about agreeing on a disagreement?

So binary packages cmdtest and yarnpkg  conflict each other?



Regards
Geert Stappers
DD

    :-)

After rethinking that:  It might work for a large part,
but it realy blocks the people who want to install both packages.


The plan is now to patch the debian yarnpkg package
so it has clearly visible that it provides `yarn`.


Groeten
Geert Stappers

Le Dimanche, Novembre 20, 2022 12:34 CET, Geert Stappers <stappers@stappers.nl> a écrit:

I don't think that "Provides: yarn" is a good thing here since "/usr/bin/yarn" isn't provided by yarnpkg. "Provides: node-yarn" seems enough here and without any consequences.

Cheers,
Yadd

As a compromise, can we have a debconf prompt to notify users about this
conflict and to run

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/yarnpkg /usr/bin/yarn

if they want to use yarn command.

Automating this via a postinst may be a good idea too, but not sure if
that is allowed by policy. May be we can ask for an exception since this
is a special case. This way people who want to use yarn command has a
way to do it easily.

Prompting users is a bad idea in general if we can have good defaults,
but we don't have much options left here.