[OE-core] npm.bbclass support for deep native modules?

[Bruce, Henry]

On Mon, 2016-11-28 at 04:35 -0600, Peter A. Bigot wrote:

Hi Peter,

I'm helping Paul with this. Sadly, I'm not much of an npm expert
either, but want to improve support for node.js development. 

> 
> Sorry, that wasn't clear.  statsd depends on modern-syslog but the 
> lockdown and shrinkwrap files generated by devtool don't include it.
> From the Wiki:
> 
> "Devtool cannot detect native libraries in module dependencies, you 
> you'll need to manually add packages to recipe"
> 
> The Wiki doesn't go into detail of how that's supposed to be done. Is
> the existing infrastructure supposed to be able to find 
> globally-installed modules?

I believe that this refers to native code depending on another native
library (e.g. libfoo). In this case, a package for libfoo would have to
be available and added to DEPENDS. This is not applicable for modern-
syslog. Paul - correct me if I've got this wrong.

> I'm wondering whether https://yarnpkg.com/ or one of the other nodejs
> dependency managers might be an alternative, as I believe npm's
> approach to dependencies is not suited to level of lockdown needed by
> Yocto and many other production systems.

Good idea, but we need to balance the complexity of adding another tool
vs. figuring this out with npm.

Back to the problem. I have re-created the statsd build failure, and
agree with your diagnosis, but don't have am immediate solution.  

I have opened a bug #10760, and added you to CC list. Let's use this
bug to communicate from hereon.
https://bugzilla.yoctoproject.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10760


Henry