[giancarlostoro]

Sometimes you're limited in production by whatever version the OS supports. In the case of Debian installing nodejs doesn't necessarily land you the latest and greatest. The same happens with Python as well. I wish they had a good way to abstract this in Debian and I'm surprised Ubuntu hasn't fully resolved it, I mean Ubuntu does have Snap but I can't trust Snaps fully if the language vendors aren't backing the only available Snaps. But to account for systems where the only version of Node or Python, or whatever is a specific version, you need systems like this.

[h1d]

Why don't you just install the official 'deb' package with the version of your choice?

https://github.com/nodesource/distributions/blob/master/READ...

[jjuel]

You can absolutely install the newest version of Python and Node on Debian. It is a little harder than just an `apt-get install`, but very possible.

[Spivak]

Of course you can install it. In many environments it's not considered maintainable to deviate from the distro provided and supported version. Especially when you have support contracts from your OS vendor.

If devs want something different from the distro provided libs we typically ask that they use containers or otherwise vendor them.

Ideally we would like our software to depend on the system for the bare minimum and security critical libs like OpenSSL so that Ops is free to switch out the underlying platform with minimal friction.