Closed mcclure closed 3 years ago
Hey @mcclure, thanks for the clarification and for taking the time to document it. Unfortunately we do not control the messages generated by Ubuntu due to dependency issues. Good to know you finally were able to get through this.
I am on an Ubuntu system (
lsb-release -a
saysUbuntu 20.04.1 LTS
). For full disclosure, I have just performed the following steps:…sooo maybe there is something quirky in my configuration after all that.
After all these steps, I ran
sudo apt install npm
. (The nodesource nodejs package contains npm, but unfortunately I didn't know that.) I got these frankly scary and confusing errors:Running
sudo apt upgrade
andsudo apt autoremove
at this point do not change the error message.After some poking and a full nodejs install and uninstall (I first saw the giant error spew above between "steps 5 and 6" above) I notice the note in the setup.x script saying that installing nodejs from the PPA also includes npm. Oops.
npm is installed and it works. Everything is okay. However, I wonder if there is some way you can improve the error messaging here. What the error is trying to communicate is "npm is already installed by another package". But the things it prints are misleading, saying things like "Depends: nodejs" (when nodejs is installed) and "Depends: node-yargs but it is not going to be installed" (It's not going to be installed? Why not?). It then claims there are "broken packages", which is misleading because all packages are correct (it's just that one of them is from your PPA). Decoding this error message took some time.
I do not know if you can do anything about this error message since it is of course Ubuntu's error message, not yours. I also don't know for a fact if this is reproducible on a system which hasn't gone through my strange trip into and out of snap-land.