Re: [gentoo-dev] Upstream build uses "npm install", how to handle this in an ebuild?

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 12/8/18 1:27 PM, Ralph Seichter wrote:
> I am trying to add NodeJS support to www-servers/nginx-unit, but the
> upstream build relies on a working network connection to download
> dependencies and execute "npm install ..." during the build process.
>
> How can this scenario be handled properly in an ebuild? I don't see
> obvious existing ebuilds that I could use as a guide. Electron seems to
> perform some npm wizardry, but I don't know what to make of it.

(I proposed one of those eclasses)

If you're really, really lucky you can:

   * Package all of the javascript dependencies first, installing them to
     /usr/lib/node_modules or wherever NodeJS is looking these days.

   * Add those new packages as dependencies to your ebuild.

   * Hack the build system to keep it from accessing the network during
     installation.

But, you're going to have problems:

   * The dependency tree for the simplest thing is hundreds of packages
     long. I'm guessing you don't have time to package them all.

   * In that mile-long list, there are packages that outright conflict.
     So ngingx-unit might depend on dev-js/foo-1.0 which depends on
     dev-js/bar-2.0 which depends on dev-js/baz-1.0 which depends on
     dev-js/foo-2.0.

   * There's no build system for these packages, so you can't install two
     libraries simultaneously and point the program to the right version.
     NodeJS upstream is actively hostile to not copy/pasting all
     libraries (recursively!) into your programs.

   * All of the upstream library developer are... javascript developers,
     and have never used anything else and agree that this is a fine way
     to do things, so they won't accept any of your PRs to make their
     dependencies consistent or to use modern versions or to avoid hard-
     coding the "node_modules" path everywhere or...