[OE-core] [RFC][PATCH 0/6] NPM refactoring

[Adrian Bunk]

On Fri, Oct 25, 2019 at 10:35:20AM +0200, Stefan Herbrechtsmeier wrote:
> Am 24.10.19 um 17:59 schrieb Richard Purdie:
> > On Thu, 2019-10-24 at 18:37 +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > > On Thu, Oct 24, 2019 at 02:12:43PM +0200, Alexander Kanavin wrote:
> > > > On Thu, 24 Oct 2019 at 14:02, Stefan Herbrechtsmeier <
> > > > stefan at herbrechtsmeier.net> wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > > @Richard: What is your opinion about the per recipe dependency?
> > > > > Typically OE use one recipe per project. The NPM based solution
> > > > > handle a
> > > > > project and all dependencies via one recipe.
> > > > 
> > > > I don't think it's at all realistic to stick to the 'one recipe per
> > > > component' in node.js world. A typical 'npm install' can pull down
> > > > hundreds, or over a thousand dependencies, it's not feasible to
> > > > have a
> > > > recipe for each.
> > > 
> > > Debian has for the perl/python/node/go/rust/haskell ecosystems
> > > one recipe per component, with ~ 1k recipes each.
> > 
> > I think we'll have to end up having a smaller number of recipes which
> > generate multiple packages. That gives a reasonable parsing time at the
> > expense of having to pre-generate some of the recipe, a bit like the
> > core perl and python recipes work today. The exact split will depend on
> > the ecosystems and the "blocks" people tend to build in as its a
> > compromise between building too much and parsing time.
> 
> How should this work? Node.js consist of multiple independent packages and
> every package define its own dependencies. Thereby the dependencies is
> defined with a version range which often reference a single version.

Yes, it is a problem that backwards compatibility is frequently broken 
in Node.js packages and just using npm might result in 10 different
versions of the same package installed and used.

This is a huge mess that either has to be sorted out when packaging
(as is done in Debian), or you end up with security support basically 
impossible for something very exposed on the internet.

> Regards
>   Stefan

cu
Adrian

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