Hi, again you are reading the blog post of Ajayi Olatunji, an Outreachy sponsored intern working on the Debian project with the Debian JavaScript team. You are probably reading this because you are trying to apply to Outreachy and you are clueless like I was when I was applying too up until several weeks into the internship. In my previous post, I tried to break down what packaging in Debian is to someone who has no experience with Free OpenSource software development or maintenance, it was not technical at all, it was targetted at complete novices (which I still also consider myself to be), check the first paragraph here out. Apart from packaging new software and updating existing packages, we also create tools for the Debian project that are useful for the community, and one of such tools is the yarn2 package I am building as part of my internship projects.

Yarn2-plugin-apt Plugin

The Outreachy project for the Debian project was described as "Create a yarn plugin to resolve node modules installed via apt", until about 6 weeks into the internship I did not have a proper grasp of what the plugin was going to be about, but over time, with lots of reading and question asking I was able to understand that what it really meant was that I am to create a plugin using yarn2 that when used on a Debian machine looks into the machine and checks if the package provided as an argument has already been installed in the past on the machine, if the package has been installed in the past it is pulled from the installation location, usually usr/share/nodejs and used in whatever other location it is needed. So, this is done instead of having to first pull the package from the yarn's (NPM) online archive like a typical package manager would do.

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