[Pkg-mailman-hackers] Bug#924961: [Mailman-Developers] Re: How strict are the dependencies on the django-compressor related backends?

[Jonas Meurer]

Hey again,

Jonas Meurer:
> I finally found some time to look into this.
> 
> * Hyperkitty doesn't need (or use) less.js/lessc at all. It can safely
>   be removed from COMPRESS_PRECOMPILERS.

I've now done this in the Debian mailman3-web package and hope to get
this into Buster before release.

> * The situation is different with sassc, it's actually used for
>   compressing CSS by hyperkitty. Doing the compression at build-time
>   should be possible but requires more work. I have a plan ;)

For that, I now also have a working implementation as well. Due to the
change being rather invasive, I will not push this into Buster though.
And my plan slightly changed during implementing it, see below ;)

>>>>>> I was wondering if we could by default not install
>>>>>> node-less/ruby-sass and what exactly that would imply.
>>
>> @Jonas M.: what do you think about [2] (again maybe after Buster)?
>> Sorry to not know more of this yet, but I hope suggesting what I think
>> might work helps to get us the right way.
> 
> I'm absolutely in favour of getting rid of the sassc runtime dependency.
> After a chat with Jonas Smedegaard (thanks for his valuable input!), I
> think that I have an idea and a roadmap on how to get there:
> 
> 1. Process `static/hyperkittysass/hyperkitty.scss` with sassc at build-
>    time and patch `templates/hyperkitty/base.html` to reference the
>    resulting CSS file.

That's what I did now, and it already was enough to drop the build-time
dependency on sassc. Django-compressor is still used to combine several
CSS and JS files into one by running 'django-admin compress' in the
postinst script of mailman3-web, but since the source files are already
clean CSS and JS, no external processors (like sassc or lessc) are required.

I think this is perfectly fine and I don't see much benefit in combining
the CSS and JS files at build-time. It would allow to drop the
django-compressor dependency but with the cost of more heavy build-time
adjustments that need to be maintained in future.

So I'm happy to now have a solution to drop both node-less and sassc
from runtime dependencies in the Debian package. Thanks to everyone for
their input on this topic.

I added a comment to upstream hyperkitty issue #120 where I proposed to
do the same in the upstream hyperkitty release process and that way get
rid of the sassc runtime dependency:

https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty/issues/120#note_179256370

Cheers
 jonas

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