[Pkg-javascript-devel] Bug#904274:

[Jérémy Lal]

2018-07-22 22:01 GMT+02:00 Nicolas Noble <nicolas at nobis-crew.org>:

> I need to voice my disagreement with the notion that compilation of addons
> is straightforward, by the way, for a few reasons.
>
> 1) compiling code IS difficult. Planning for every single compiler, edge
> case, combinations of libraries, etc is fairly nightmarish. gRPC for
> instance is publishing 123 precompiled binaries only for node, and we are
> limiting ourselves to a known compiler.
>
> In fact, a good third of our issues are linked with the compilability of
> our addon.
>

It's difficult in the general sense, yes, but compiling on a platform like
debian/ubuntu/fedora is much easier.


> 2) Not everyone WANTS a compiler to be present on their production
> machines. This is often viewed as a security risk.
>
3) It's time consuming. Compiling the gRPC node extension at the moment
> takes roughly 1 to 2 minutes, whereas the downloading of a precompiled
> binary is almost instant. For deployment at scale, these are precious CPU
> resources being consumed for the sake of recompilation. For development
> time, these are frequent "2 minutes" being lost by developers waiting for
> their npm dependencies to compile.
>

Points read and granted, yet i find it very much less risky to recompile
than to install foreign binaries.
Anyway, since libgrpc is already available as a debian package, why not
package directly node-grpc in debian ?

Jérémy
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