| 15 Dec 2023 |
 avocadoom | maybe this is an oversight and they can make it a default or something like that | 13:43:28 |
|  Taeer Bar-Yam joined the room. | 14:54:36 |
| 18 Dec 2023 |
|  Mason Mackaman joined the room. | 08:51:00 |
| Mason Mackaman | what is the current best tools for the job in this department? npmlock2nix was my go to a year ago, but now it's not working for me. I'm trying to rangle dream2nix but I'm not liking the UX so far, and certain things are just now working such that I've had to patch the code for my stuff to build. so yeah, I'm wondering if there have been any other tools introduced since last I have needed to tackle this horrible problem. | 08:53:34 |
| Mason Mackaman | * what is the current best tools for the job in this department? npmlock2nix was my go to a year ago, but now it's not working for me. I'm trying to rangle dream2nix but I'm not liking the UX so far, and certain things are just not working such that I've had to patch the code for my stuff to build. so yeah, I'm wondering if there have been any other tools introduced since last I have needed to tackle this horrible problem. | 08:53:55 |
 Wanja Hentze | here's my view:
- npmlock2nix: worked okay, but undermaintained and never got lockfile v3 support
- buildNpmPackage (from nixpkgs): works fine, but needs prefetching. makes one big derivation for deps and is thus slow for small dep changes
- dream2nix: too complicated, couldn't get it to work
- floco: too complicated, couldn't get it to work
- adisbladis' buildNodeModules: worked great and looks simple, needs no prefetcher. is very very alpha stage software though
| 08:58:55 |
| Wanja Hentze | things I've yet to check out: serokell/nix-npm-buildpackage, napalm | 09:00:34 |
| *  @adis:blad.is should put buildNodeModules in nixpkgs | 09:07:12 |
| Wanja Hentze | do ittt | 09:08:12 |
 Sandro 🐧 | Didn't it require to always commit package.json or the lock file to do IFD? | 13:06:58 |
| Sandro 🐧 | If it is without IFD or coming lock files and really just works, we should just use it for everything. We shouldn't really have multiple ways to build things if one thing is superior | 13:07:40 |
| Wanja Hentze | yes it does | 13:08:50 |
| Wanja Hentze | the asymmetry here is from nixpkgs-internal vs. external use | 13:09:05 |
| Wanja Hentze | for external stuff that's consuming nixpkgs, having the package.json and package-lock.json committed is actually totally fine | 13:09:34 |
| Wanja Hentze | now, should nixpkgs export packaging helpers that it doesn't even want to use for itself? maybe, maybe not | 13:10:17 |
| Wanja Hentze | fwiw I'm kinda salty that poetry2nix got removed because it wasn't used internally anymore. | 13:10:57 |
| Wanja Hentze | downstream repos have their own lockfiles committed anyway. but they might want to update deps more often, so an expensive prefetch step is more of a problem than it is for nixpkgs | 13:12:52 |
| Sandro 🐧 | In reply to @whentze:matrix.org
fwiw I'm kinda salty that poetry2nix got removed because it wasn't used internally anymore. It got removed because it was broken after the bootstrapping changed and it wasn't fixed for some time | 13:47:58 |
| Sandro 🐧 | Also vendoring other git repos into the tree is mäh | 13:48:16 |
| Sandro 🐧 | In reply to @whentze:matrix.org
for external stuff that's consuming nixpkgs, having the package.json and package-lock.json committed is actually totally fine But it is really, really fat | 13:48:50 |
| Sandro 🐧 | We can't just xz compress them and then commit them? 😅 | 13:49:12 |
| Wanja Hentze | I think you're misunderstanding me | 13:49:29 |
| Wanja Hentze | I'm not saying let's commit a bunch of lockfiles to nixpkgs | 13:49:41 |
| Wanja Hentze | the use case is "I have a nodejs project and my lockfile is already in git, I want to write a default.nix" | 13:50:28 |
| Wanja Hentze | this has nothing to do with nixpkgs other than that it would be nice to get the packaging helper function from nixpkgs | 13:51:48 |
| Wanja Hentze | hence me asking "is it worthwhile to ship packaging helpers in nixpkgs that are not dogfooded by nixpkgs?" | 13:53:33 |
| Sandro 🐧 | Maybe depends on size but e.g. vendoring yarn2nix seemed more of a headache then it needs to be. Other things are just put in as a CLI is that's possible | 15:15:05 |
| Wanja Hentze | oh wait | 15:16:02 |
| Wanja Hentze | you're talking about vendoring the packaging helper, not the packages | 15:16:15 |
| Wanja Hentze | in this case, it's really not a ton of code: https://github.com/adisbladis/buildNodeModules | 15:16:46 |
