[Nix-dev] Simplify node packages?

[Profpatsch]

On 17-04-25 12:21pm, Sander van der Burg wrote:
> I'm not sure if you have read my blog articles correctly, but what node2nix
> currently does is one derivation per application and statically bundles all
> NPM dependencies with it. The old approach that npm2nix used to implement
> was a derivation per dependency and symlinking between them. As explained
> in this blog post:
> http://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2016/02/managing-npm-flat-module-installations.html
> this works for many packages, but does not reliably work in all cases.
> Moreover, it does not work with packages having cyclic dependencies.

Apart from cyclic dependencies and leaving out “flattened” trees,
are there any other deal-breakers you can think of?

> Now yarn (and other approaches such as ied) do obviously a much better job
> than NPM in some aspects. Unfortunately, as of today, NPM remains the
> de-facto standard for Node.js package deployment, and I'm not sure if this
> will ever change.

yarn is pretty much a drop-in replacement for npm.
Instead of `npm install && node2nix` you say `yarn install && yarn2nix`
and you get a local `node_modules` and in yarn’s case also a `yarn.lock`.

So as far as packaging goes, adoption should not matter imho.

> The latter aspect can only be solved if NPM makes their dependency
> addressing and composition facilities better.

+1 

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