Re: bringing npm packages to Guix

[Mekeor Melire <mekeor@posteo.de>]

2022-11-19 18:27 zamfofex@twdb.moe:

> Hello, Guix!

Hello :)

> A few months ago, I picked up the work towards importing npm packages to 
> Guix by Jelle et al. in the hopes of continuing it, and I felt disheartened 
> when I concluded that it does indeed seem like a very large part of npm is 
> necessary to build even a simple package like jQuery.

Thanks for bringing this back up!

Although, I work with the node/npm ecosystem on a daily basis, unfortunately, 
I don't really understand why it's so difficult to import npm-packages into 
Guix.

> But, recently, I decided to spend some more time thinking about it, and I 
> realized that not all of the ‘devDependencies’ of a given package are 
> actually necessary to build it. A lot of packages have ‘devDependencies’ for 
> things such as tests and watching the filesystem for changes for ease of 
> development.

Is importing npm-packages into Guix difficult because npm-packages have so 
many dependencies?

> If you think about it, what the vast majority of npm packages need to build 
> successfully comes down to (optionally) compile TypeScript, then 
> (optionally) perform some kind of bundling or transpilation. And that 
> doesn’t really require TypeScript or a build tool from npm, since esbuild 
> (which is already packaged) can do both of those things by itself.

Is importing npm-packages into Guix so difficult because we have a 
chicken-and-egg problem, since many build-time dependencies (like TypeScript) 
have so many dependencies themselves?

Also, is there a reason to choose esbuild over rust-swc (or vice versa)?

> Now, taking away the ‘devDependencies’ when recursing the dependency tree 
> makes the whole endeavor of importing an npm package seem *much less* 
> difficult and scary! The biggest unfortunate issue is that for packages with 
> a build step (TypeScript and/or bundling+transpilation), it is necessary to 
> use esbuild ad‐hoc (i.e. in a case-by-case basis), because each package has 
> its own build peculiarities, and esbuild doesn’t acknowledge them. (One 
> solution could be to create an esbuild wrapper that mimics ‘tsc’ and other 
> tools.)

Could we also build TSC with Esbuild, and then use TSC to build packages that 
depend on it, instead of mimicking TSC with Esbuild? Does that make sense?

With "mimicking TSC", do you mean that Esbuild does not transpile multiple 
.ts-files at once? (By the way, Esbuild seems to make use of the tsconfig.json 
file, according to <https://esbuild.github.io/api/#tsconfig>.)

> With that approach in mind, I was able to package sucrase as a proof of 
> concept! Note that sucrase doesn’t have a lot of transitive dependencies, so 
> it was easy to just modify the phases of each package in an ad‐hoc way. 
> However, also note that sucrase depends on itself, so I decided to bootstrap 
> it with esbuild, then use the bootstrapped version to build sucrase again. 
> (The bootstrapped sucrase seems to also work as expected!)

That's so great!

Sorry for asking nooby questions. I just want to catch up and press ahead with 
the discussion.