Re: Merging the “binary” NPM importer?

[Philip McGrath]

Hi,

I've been using the NPM binary importer recently, and I'm also in favor 
of merging it. Aside from helping me get practical work done, it's also 
pointed me toward things in the Node package and node-build-system that 
may need to be tweaked (e.g. https://issues.guix.gnu.org/49946#71). So, 
like Christine, I hope that letting people use Guix to work on Node/NPM 
stuff would ultimately help the cause of making NPM packages work in 
Guix the right way.

On 9/26/21 5:34 PM, pinoaffe wrote:
> Jelle Licht writes:
> > Could you perhaps list some additional blockers?  We can always refine
> > and improve on an acceptable upstreamed version, since it will be a
> > once-and-done tool instead of some stable API.
>
> I think one would also need to deal with the fact that a recursive
> import is likely to include several versions of the same package,

This did seem to happen with a large package I imported, but the 
multiple versions coexisting seemed to work ok. Ultimately, Guix will 
somehow need to deal with the messy versioning of the NPM world, and it 
would be nice to keep the duplication to a minimum, but that seems like 
it might be a challenge. Since the recursive imports do currently work, 
I don't think it needs to be a blocker.

> and I think rebasing might end up requiring a bit of rewriting since it
> appears to me that some of the interfaces used in the guix-npm-binary
> importer have changed since it was written

Here's the version I've been using, rebased on August 3: 
<https://gitlab.com/philip1/guix-patches/-/commit/7b8732bbfcacd52b2ea823358cff842a891b51b2>

One issue I did notice is that the export `package-json->guix-package` 
seems to be undefined.

-Philip