This is likely a controversial issue given the original work and history around packaging web assets as bundled RPM and Debian packages on the packaging side. I'm opening this issue and the accompanying proposed fix for discussion and consideration given recent changes and frustrations with packaging of web assets.

Myself and others, I believe (see an example here: https://github.com/theforeman/foreman-packaging/pull/1453#issuecomment-274470960) feel that there is too much developer churn that the current method imposes. Some of the reasoning:

• all required assets have to be turned into RPMs
• EPEL updated the version of nodejs which caused a breaking change which means all packages will have to have their specs updated when time comes to update them
• RPM and Debian have to package all of these resources
• requires one or more new RPMs every time a new asset is added and given that nodejs and JavaScript libraries tend to follow a more modular model this creates a cycle that happens more so than rubygems
• these are build dependencies only
• the build dependencies are already behind develop
• this change would free up and speed up UI development