.zsh

[MalikRumi]

I was following your documentation to install nvm. However, I changed the reference to bash at the end to zsh, since that's what I use on my mac. I was a little surprised at the tone of the response I got back. It certainly felt condescending, even disapproving. Given that so many of us Mac users are out here, and have become used to substituting zsh for instructions that reference bash, or neither, it is to be expected that a lot of us will do exactly what I did. In fact, the presence of this -- 'error message' -- strongly suggests that it happens quite frequently or you would not have put this tone deaf message into the response. That being so, you and your users would be well served by saying so in the documentation, right along side the sample code you give for installation. | Second, this restriction raises questions, at least for me. Are we to expect bugs and other issues with nvm - or node, npm, typescript (maintained by Microsoft... is that an issue?), and the rest of your ecosystem, because we have zsh? Can you list those out for us, along with workarounds? I already know they aren't in the docs. A search for zsh only got three hits, all of which were on the same page, and two in the same paragraph. So, since you are so explicit in your messaging, you should also be explicit as to why you have this preference, and what consequences zsh users might expect from having the wrong shell. | Finally, if you are going to argue that nvm is a different app with different maintainers, that won't impress me. These are your docs I'm looking at, and since you recommend nvm you ought to know what they're doing. Besides, my request for change was about your docs, not theirs.

The fun continues…
Last login: Tue Nov 26 20:16:11 on ttys000
https://nodejs.org/en/download/package-manager/all#nvm
“On Unix / OS X systems Node.js built from source can be installed using nvm by installing into the location that nvm expects:”
Apparently, the values to these constants are known to nvm, and need not be known by me. I see no other way of interpreting this command we are told to put into the command line. However:

malikarumi@Maliks-MacBook-Pro ~ % env VERSION=`python tools/getnodeversion.py` make install DESTDIR=`nvm_version_path v$VERSION` PREFIX=""
zsh: command not found: python
make: *** No rule to make target `install'.  Stop.
malikarumi@Maliks-MacBook-Pro ~ % which python
python not found
malikarumi@Maliks-MacBook-Pro ~ % which python3
/usr/bin/python3
malikarumi@Maliks-MacBook-Pro ~ % python3 --version
Python 3.9.6
malikarumi@Maliks-MacBook-Pro ~ % env VERSION=`python3 tools/getnodeversion.py` make install DESTDIR=`nvm_version_path v$VERSION` PREFIX=""
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/python3: can't open file '/Users/malikarumi/tools/getnodeversion.py': [Errno 2] No such file or directory
make: *** No rule to make target `install'.  Stop.
malikarumi@Maliks-MacBook-Pro ~ %

Yes, I see the error where ‘python3’ is concatenated to the ‘tools’ path. My paste of your code has the space between python3 and ‘tools’. I found this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45801457/node-js-python-not-found-exception-due-to-node-sass-and-node-gyp
Surely your install is not still dependent on Python 2.7? But the first line of the code on your repo is “from future import print_function”, a sure sign of Python 2.7.
https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/main/tools/getnodeversion.py
tools/getnodeversion.py
You do know Apple stopped shipping Python 2 a long time ago, don’t you? A simple question: How am I supposed to get this thing working on a Mac? If your answer is homebrew, why tell mac users to do it this way in your docs? Do your docs need an upgrade?
All this, and I wasn’t interesting in node to begin with. I just need it for sass.

[ljharb]

@MalikRumi feel free to file an issue on https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm about this, but the documentation already says bash, and you should never feel comfortable blindly substituting one shell for another without first confirming compatibility. while nvm itself works fine on zsh, the install script only works on bash, and you can run the install command in zsh as long as you don't change it.

[hernandemonteiro]

i think that...
It’s not about the shell; the issue is that the install script calls python instead of python3. This can cause problems on systems where python isn’t mapped to Python 3.

[ljharb]

ah, that's part of node's own installation, which has nothing to do with nvm.