Subject: [bug#51838] [PATCH v8 00/41] guix: node-build-system: Support compiling add-ons with node-gyp.

From: Timothy Sample <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2022 11:49:26 -0500

Hi Liliana,

Thanks for putting this together!  I’m starting to think that we might
actually land this series pretty soon.  :)

Liliana Marie Prikler <[email-masked]> writes:

> 4. Regexps :)

I doubt regex support will be broadly useful here.  Putting the anchors
in every package name (e.g., "^tap$") makes for a lot of noise.  My
(wild) guess would be that regexes will save us listing two dependencies
for one out of every ten Node packages.  Given that, my preference would
be to not bother with regex support.

You wrote this in another message:

> I think it'd be beneficial if delete-dependencies could delete
> dependencies based on their name matching a regexp rather than a
> string exactly.  This would make some of your lists shorter
> (e.g. "karma.*"), but there might be a debate on whether to use
> "^karma.*$" or whether to only consider regexps that match the
> dependency fully.

If nothing else, I’m certainly on the other side of this debate!  :)
If every string is going to be treated as a pattern, we should have it
match fully by default.  That is, the anchors should be implicit.  For
the very rare (never?) case where you want to avoid anything that so
much as has “foo” in the name, it’s pretty easy to write ".*foo.*".

-- Tim