Re: What's the story for NPM packages?

[Thomas Klausner <wiz%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 09:48:59AM +0100, Benny Siegert wrote:
> When you try to install, say, bower "globally", it is trying to write
> directly under /usr/pkg, which is probably not a good idea. Then
> again, installing bower pulls in literally hundreds of npm
> dependencies, so I don't think that adding pkgsrc packages for each
> individual one is a good use of anyone's time.
> 
> So what should we do? Maybe add logic to npm to create "ephemeral"
> packages and at least register the metadata? Or do hundreds of trivial
> packages, cpan-style?

I once wanted to use a node.js program and tried installing the
dependencies with npm. The problem was that some of the dependencies
weren't compiling on NetBSD, and it was really hard to

a) find out where the source is downloaded to
b) find out how to patch it
c) find out how to make that repeatable

In the end I gave up. So while npm might be nice on Linux, where
everyone tests their stuff on all distributions and makes sure it
compiles and works, I think for NetBSD, small packages in the style of
perl would be better.
 Thomas