Re: GSoC NPM

[Thompson, David]

On Sun, Sep 4, 2016 at 10:11 AM, Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> wrote:

>    * add --binary option to importer, sets (arguments (#:binary? #t))

This violates a core principle of Guix: reproducible builds.  I don't
support patches that encourage using pre-built binaries.

> As a first attempt, I tried to recursively import `q', a fairly basic
> package from my possibly ignorant perspective: can you write anything
> non-trivial in node without using q?.  When that resulted in over 6004
> dependencies (using build systems grunt, gulp and node-gyp, listing 582
> errors), I was pretty sure there was a problem with your importer.
> Using the --binary option, q has no dependencies.  None.  Single
> package.  Hmm.

That's because the thing on npm has already been built for you.  q
*does* have dependencies if you want to build it from source, which is
what we should all be striving for.

- Dave