Subject: bug#27049: [PATCH] gnu: Add mathjax.

From: Mike Gerwitz <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 May 2017 20:55:14 -0400

On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 18:04:19 +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Jelle Licht <[email-masked]> skribis:
>> Another issue with minifiers in general is that is Very Hard to write a
>> proper minifier. If we choose to not use the minifier as expected by the
>> package author, we will at some point run into issues that will be very
>> hard to report and get fixed upstream, as it will only be us experiencing
>> these issues due to our ... unique .. build procedure.
>
> Sure.  My suggestion would be to use an existing, established minifier,
> only one that is relatively simple to package.  It could be one written
> in a language other than JS (Ricardo mentioned ‘cl-uglify-js’ on IRC),
> or it could be a simplistic minifier written in JS but with very few or
> not dependencies, if that exists.

Further, minifiers have various options and some methods are more
aggressive than others.  Last I checked a couple years ago, for example,
Closure Compiler broke GNU ease.js on its more aggressive setting.  The
break was obvious from running my test suite, but some breaks were
subtle and would have caused nightmares in production.  Perhaps things
have since improved.

My point is, though, that Jelle's concerns are shared.  Closure Compiler
is written by Google, and they tend to know what they're doing in this
area. ;)

I'm not saying I'm opposed; it sounds fine to me.  Just be careful!

-- 
Mike Gerwitz
Free Software Hacker+Activist | GNU Maintainer & Volunteer
GPG: D6E9 B930 028A 6C38 F43B  2388 FEF6 3574 5E6F 6D05
https://mikegerwitz.com