Package: novnc Version: 1:1.6.0-2 Severity: minor Dear Maintainer,
novnc declares "Depends: nodejs", but nodejs is not needed to serve or use the viewer. At runtime the viewer is static HTML/JS in /usr/share/novnc, served by python3 websockify. Only the developer helper scripts utils/convert.js and utils/genkeysymdef.js invoke node. Effect: on trixie, removing nodejs (for example to drop an old Node 20 in favour of a newer Node installed elsewhere) also forces removal of novnc, even though the viewer keeps working without it. Workaround we use: an empty local package that only provides nodejs, built with dpkg-deb. Its DEBIAN/control is: Package: ag-nodejs-shim Version: 1.0 Architecture: all Maintainer: Vantage <[email protected]> Provides: nodejs Description: Empty placeholder satisfying novnc's nodejs dependency novnc only uses node for unused dev utilities; websockify serves it at runtime. With this shim installed and nodejs purged, novnc and websockify stay installed and the web viewer works normally (tested over websockify). Suggested fix: move nodejs from Depends to Recommends (or Suggests), since it is only needed for the optional dev utilities. I searched the BTS (https://bugs.debian.org/novnc, including archived bugs) and upstream noVNC GitHub issues and found no existing report of this. -- System Information: Debian Release: 13 (trixie) Architecture: amd64
