[Pkg-javascript-devel] Bug#904274:

[Nicolas Noble]

We actually have given up on maintaining libgrpc on Debian as it was too
much time consuming for little expertise on our side. We decided that
shipping precompiled binaries for the various languages was kind of easier,
until this nodejs issue that is. As mentioned, the manylinux python thing
is a kind of a boon in that regard.

On Sun, Jul 22, 2018, 13:40 Jérémy Lal <kapouer at melix.org> wrote:

>
>
> 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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