Re: [Buildroot] [PATCH 1/2] package/nodejs: introduce BR2_PACKAGE_HOST_NODEJS_COREPACK

From: Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@bootlin.com>
To: Thomas Claveirole <thomas.claveirole@green-communications.fr>
Cc: Daniel Price <daniel.price@gmail.com>,
	Martin Bark <martin@barkynet.com>,
	Johan Oudinet <johan.oudinet@gmail.com>,
	buildroot@buildroot.org
Subject: Re: [Buildroot] [PATCH 1/2] package/nodejs: introduce BR2_PACKAGE_HOST_NODEJS_COREPACK
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2022 12:01:07 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20220926120059.1c0c677b@windsurf> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <3124822.5fSG56mABF@harderbit>

Hello Thomas,

On Mon, 26 Sep 2022 11:04:38 +0200
Thomas Claveirole <thomas.claveirole@green-communications.fr> wrote:

> > Replying to myself: "corepack enable" does not download stuff. [...]  
> 
> It sounds good indeed.  To be honest, all this Node packaging gets a bit over 
> my head and I am not sure how it works exactly (the whole JavaScript packaging 
> ecosystem just looks crazy to me).

You're not the only one with the same feeling :-)

> I thought that using host-nodejs to compile JavaScript packages was a new 
> Buildroot policy, but apparently according to [1] and [2] we prefer to stick 
> to precompiled JavaScript files?  If so, I will send a v2 patch for the vuejs 
> package (... when I find some time.)
> 
> [1] https://lore.kernel.org/buildroot/20220919114617.67d80b53@windsurf/
> [2] https://lore.kernel.org/buildroot/20220924170516.4a0323dc@windsurf/
> 
> (As for my opinion, should it have any relevance: I also prefer that Buildroot 
> relies on pre-compiled files, at least as long as it cannot do some vendoring 
> for Node packages.  Downloading stuff outside of Buildroot's download system 
> is quite annoying.)

So, as explained in
https://lore.kernel.org/buildroot/20220919114617.67d80b53@windsurf/
(which you pointed above), if we want to build from source these JS
stuff, we need two things:

 - Be able to use a pre-built NodeJS on the host, because adding a
   dependency on building host-nodejs from source is really too heavy
   to build just a few JS files. I have submitted yesterday a RFC patch
   series that implements this.

 - Be able to vendor JS dependencies. I already started working on it,
   and it does work with npm, but my test package (forge) only
   provides a package.json to describe dependencies, so they are not
   locked and therefore not reproducible. However, it looks like many
   other packages, including vuejs, provide a pnpm-lock.yaml, which
   apparently allow a reproducible fetching of dependencies. Which is
   why I got into what pnpm is, and how to install it, and got to your
   corepack-related patch :-)

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, co-owner and CEO, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering and training
https://bootlin.com
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