Re: GSoC NPM

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi, Jelle!

Jelle Licht <address@hidden> skribis:

> To start of with something that did not work out as well as I had hoped,
> getting
> a popular build system (e.g. Gulp, Grunt, Broccoli and others) packaged. As
> mentioned in my earlier mails, the list of transitive dependencies of any of
> these suffer from at least the following:
> - It is a list with more than 4000 packages on it
> - It is a list with at some point the package itself on it
> As a compromise I wanted to get a testing framework packaged instead,
> because everyone likes testing. While looking at the dependencies of a
> testing
> framework, I noticed that I had a need for CoffeeScript. Having a passing
> familiarity with the CoffeeScript dialect, I researched how one could
> achieve
> this. At the moment of this writing, I have packaged CoffeeScript v1.0.0,
> to be
> found in my git repo. What I did not account for nor foresaw was that
> bootstrapping CoffeeScript took some effort. My earlier, optimistic
> estimates
> were based on a flaw that lacked the isolation which is needed for a proper
> reproducible build. Anyway, if any of you want to play around with
> CoffeeScript
> v1.0.0 or any of the 50+(!) preceding versions, be my guest.

I haven’t looked at the code but, as discussed at the GHM, I think that
importing CoffeeScript and especially finding the right path in this
maze of dependencies and versions to bootstrap it is an achievement.

It provides a concrete illustration of how hard it is to build from
source even relatively recent JS code.

Anyway, make sure to ping Chris and Dave so we can get this code in
‘master’ soon!  :-)

Thank you!

Ludo’.

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