Subject: Re: bug#51838: [PATCH 00/11] guix: node-build-system: Support compiling add-ons with node-gyp.

From: Timothy Sample <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2021 14:59:33 -0500

Hello,

Pierre Langlois <[email-masked]> writes:

> Hi Timothy,
>
> Timothy Sample <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> More importantly, is the general plan that we merge these changes,
>> and then Pierre rebases their Tree-sitter changes on top these?
>>
>> Pierre, maybe you could weigh in here?
>
> The overall approach looks good to me, it's better than what I
> originally proposed for sure :-).  That being said, I'm not very
> familiar with the Node.js ecosystem so I don't know if it's necessarily
> the right way, but I suspect the correct way for node isn't very Guix-y
> so I'm not too worried about that.

The whole Node.js bundles NPM, which bundles node-gyp, which bundles a
fork of GYP [1] is not very Guix-y at all, no.  :/  This is one of those
problems (like bootstrapping GCC) that will take years of incremental
improvements and side projects and all that.

[1] Not to get too off topic, but isn’t “gyp” a slur?  How did Google
ever call something that?

> It's on my TODO list to take another look at the patches as well :-),
> then yes, I'm planning on rebasing my tree-sitter series on top.

Excellent!

>> Sorry if I missed something.  I assume everything is OK, but I want to
>> be sure before I start digging into the details of the patches –
>> especially those first few more complicated ones.  :)
>
> Thanks for taking a look!

I have an idea to simplify the patch series a bit: if we can answer my
question here <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/51838#57> and come to a
conclusion about deleting lock files
<https://issues.guix.gnu.org/51838#58>, I could merge the
‘#:absent-dependencies’ part of the patch series.  I think this might
make future re-rolls easier and help rein in the scope a bit.

Thoughts?  Philip?

Thanks!

-- Tim