Well I for one am not interested in 90% of submissions here but like you I have to live with the voting system here to take care of this... and I simply don't read what I'm not interested in. Since GitHub does not notify me satisfactorily about new releases -- "watching" projects gives me a huge noisy stream about all their various activities so a new release gets lost in that stream -- and since twitter.com/nodejs is unfortunately not maintained, YC HN is an outstanding way to get notified about new NodeJS, jQuery etc. releases.
I don't follow V8 version to version, I'm a little bit curious: I notice each node release has a newer V8 version, is this just grabbing a newer version of V8 as a general practice, or is there specific changes in V8 applicable to node?
(The may be a question better asked on the google group)
Awesome, I like your approach even better than mine (below). Switched to this but will keep my script for my future users in case they're NodeJS noobs...
I have written the following script for this. Update all the version numbers for the next update. Somehow I was too lazy to make this a variable. Downloads the Node TAR.GZ to the current folder and extracts, so put this in some extra folder such as "node_setup". And run the script with sudo.
#!/bin/bash
apt-get install build-essential g++ curl libssl-dev apache2-utils pkg-config
wget http://nodejs.org/dist/node-v0.4.5.tar.gz
gunzip node-v0.4.5.tar.gz
tar -xf node-v0.4.5.tar
cd node-v0.4.5
./configure
make
make install
Checkout from github: git://github.com/joyent/node.git
Now:
git checkout v0.4.5
./configure
make
sudo make install
node -v
There are other ways, but this is pretty simple. Note that when you checkout the tag you will be in a detached HEAD state, which is fine, but when you next want to git pull, make sure you checkout master first, then checkout the next tag you require. You can see all tags with: git tag.
"... the easiest way to update an existing node.js (ubuntu) installation? ..."
The latest vid from ryan ~ http://blog.nodejs.org/2011/03/17/welcome-to-the-node-blog/ explained the need to download & install from source. This presumes you have V8 installed. Holler if you get into trouble I've installed a few times on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron.
"... You mean, he explained that it was necessary to build from source, and why? Is this information available in textual form? ..."
It isn't 100% necessary. You can install from binaries. But as node is a moving target as a dev you get the best feature set/bug fixed version, faster. The talk hasn't been transcribed to my knowledge. Why not view the vid or ask @ryan or irc://irc.freenode.net#freenode why from source? The install instructions here ~ https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installation or install binaries here ~ https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installing-Node.js-via-p...
