Hi Josh, As for packages, I can't speak to Fedora offhand, but Ubuntu has the "nodejs" package which is what we've used internally for development and for the devstack gate going forward. The LESS binary itself is being bundled with Horizon to alleviate versioning incompatibilities and package differences across OS's.
As for why, having been involved in the discussion and decision let me present a few components of the reasoning as they relate to Horizon's core values (expressed here: http://horizon.openstack.org/intro.html#values): 1. Manageable: The CSS stylesheet for the OpenStack Dashboard had become unmaintainable. It was and (until we split it up after LESS lands) is a complete mess, over 1000 lines long. We needed a solution that continues to allow us to build in a more reasonable fashion. There are plenty of modern tools for this (LESS, SASS, etc.). We can split apart the stylesheet into logical modules, define variables, mixins and transformations so we update code in one place rather than twenty... so on and so forth. 2. Extensible: LESS allows third-party developers to import and build from the core stylesheet(s) instead of copying and pasting the stylesheet wholesale, causing the pain of staying up-to-date with changes, bugfixes, etc. 3. Consistent: As mentioned above, we can define variables and mixins which can be used everywhere, preventing the "I wrote the same styles ten places and forgot to update them all" problems that every frontend developer knows all too well. 4. Stable: At this point node.js and LESS are well-proven technologies, being leveraged by large companies and large projects all over the globe. 5. Usable: From a developer standpoint, LESS and SASS are light-years ahead of static CSS in terms of writing code. The end product to the consumer is more-or-less identical. We did evaluate a number of other implementation options for meeting these needs (develop with LESS and commit both the .less and final .css files, using SASS which is built on Ruby, etc.) but came to this as the best long-term solution. All the best, - Gabriel From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Joshua Harlow Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2012 10:34 AM To: openstack Cc: Yahoo Openstack Developers Subject: [Openstack] Nodejs in horizon Hi all, I was seeing that node.js is now being used in horizon. Is there any details on why that was needed, the reasoning, the technical docs on where it is used. Are there packages available in fedora/ubuntu for this? Such a change seems like it should have a little more reasoning/explanation that what I found @ https://github.com/openstack-dev/devstack/commit/0c2891558122aa9d030811109536caf5c81cfb75 or https://blueprints.launchpad.net/horizon/+spec/transition-to-lesscss Do we really need to have that ?? :-/ -Josh
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