On Wed, 21 Aug 2019 at 22:59:50 +0530, Pirate Praveen wrote: > On 2019, ഓഗസ്റ്റ് 21 7:06:34 PM IST, Simon McVittie <s...@debian.org> wrote: > >* As far as I can tell, the command-line executable > >`.../bin/autoprefixer` > > is not in the PATH. I don't know whether it is run automatically in > > some other way, analogous to a program in /usr/libexec. > > - Please fact-check: is it in the PATH? Is it run as an executable > > in some other way? > > I was not using this command personally so I was OK to remove nodejs > dependency if it was rejected.
That doesn't answer my question. I looked at this executable again and it seems as though its purpose is to query metadata about the autoprefixer nodejs library, analogous to the -config programs sometimes found in -dev packages (sdl2-config and so on). Is that correct? Is it run automatically by some piece of Node infrastructure (like the way the build systems of some SDL games automatically run sdl2-config to learn which compiler and linker options they should use for SDL), or is it intended to be run manually by a developer, or what? Is there any situation in which it would be run by a developer who does not already know that they have nodejs installed? > So in general there is two cases I want to be able to create multiple > binaries. > > 1. Cases like node-autoprefixer if the executable is useful (in specific case > of node-autoprefixer , I can live without the executable for now). > 2. Cases like ruby-task-list where there is more dependencies than the > interpreter. I think these are different, and each should be considered on its own merits, so this bug might make more sense if it is cloned (split) to offer advice on the two different situations. For the node-autoprefixer case, if we decide that the executable is not sufficiently important to the overall function of the package to merit a dependency, it's probably useful to compare and contrast with cleancss.deb from the node-clean-css source package (which *is* a separate binary package, and it looks to me as though that was the correct decision). smcv