2018-03-05 11:34 GMT+01:00 Catonano <catonano@gmail.com>:
Hello list

there's this project
https://github.com/rollup/rollup

I don't understand what it does, maybe because I don't know the first thing about javascript

You can think about this as a module system for javascript. Much like our use-module and 
export... This support is not yet available in most javascript engines, and the javascript
community uses tools to get the support now, removing the tools, when support becomes
available.
 

I was wondering if that changes the situation with regard to porting npm based software in Guix

Comments appreciated

I believe that this doesn't change the situation much. The problem is a more generic one, though.
Actually the problem is not that we can't get npm based software working, as it is quite possible to
package these. The problem is that npm fixes the versions, and this causes a version explosion
in our repository. Most of those version requirements can be liberally relaxed, so that we don't need
all those package versions. One of the things that could be done, is to try to find out the real version
requirements of the software, and then, when the relaxed requirements of all packages involved
get known optimize for the lowest number of packages required. This seems to be hard.
We also have this kind of problem with virtually all language specific package managers.