Re: GSoC NPM

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi

> I also took both Ludovic', as well as Catonano's detailed feedback on the
> initial draft of the recursive importer into account when rewriting it. It
> should now only visit each node in the dependency graph once, and be a
> whole lot
> more efficient as well. It is still based on the multi-valued return values
> that drove Ricardo's initial work on the CRAN recursive importer.

[...]

> After rewriting the recursive importer to be
> more
> sane, I scrawled some notes on my notepad that basically boil down to the
> following:
> 1. We should only look up each npm package once, if possible
> 2. We should have a list of all npm package names.
> 3. We should be able to specify the maximum traversal depth

I’m not sure I understand.  The CRAN recursive importer visits
packages only once because it keeps track of previously imported
packages (in addition to those that are already in Guix).

> An easy-yet-inelegant solution would be to include the package name as used
> within the npm registry as metadata via an argument to the
> node-build-system.

That’s not so inelegant; or at least we have precedent in Guix.  For
CRAN and Bioconductor packages we often add something like this:

    (properties `((upstream-name . "ACSNMineR")))

This is already used by the updater.

~~ Ricardo