On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 9:00 PM, C. Mundi <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi. I have another naive question. Nathan has been helping me out == a lot > == with node-gyp and node-bindings and I want to say publicly that these > tools are going to be ++huge for those of us forced work in > platform-heterogeneous networks.
I appreciate the complements :) Truly, that's what makes us devs working on these things in our free time keep at it. > > One thing I notice is that node-bindings seems designed to support the > pattern of installing a separate copy of each required module with the > requiring node app. This practice of multiple copies makes (made) a certain > amount of sense before node-bindings, because it provides one way to ensure > the version, platform and architecture of modules match the requiring app. I think you might be misunderstanding where node-bindings fits in the scheme of node's module system, node_modules, and npm. node-bindings was designed as a stopgap for this transition from waf to gyp. There's a lot of native modules out there that have waf-style require paths to their project's bindings (like "./build/Release/bindings.node"), but now gyp and node-gyp by default build into "./out/Release/bindings.node" (on Unix) and "./Release/bindings.node" (on Windows). So node-bindings simply provides a way to try these various paths to load the first path that actually works. So I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "node-bindings seems designed to support the pattern of installing a separate copy of each required module with the requiring node app." Previously most people had their uses compile modules with node-waf at install-time, so we didn't have to worry about version, platform, and architecture, but now that we're leaning towards binary distribution, we will need to think about that (so node-bindings also attempts to solve that problem with a folder convention, see node-ffi for an example: https://github.com/rbranson/node-ffi/tree/master/compiled/0.6). But like I said, it's a stopgap solution that is nice in the meantime but will probably be phased out by something more integrated with node/npm. > > But now (when) node-bindings does that. So what are the remaining reasons > to keep multiple copies of modules instead of just installing globally > shared copies (which could still be segregated by platform)? (I have not > studied the JavaScript runtime model, so if you tell me that two apps > requiring the same file implies some shared state I would not be surprised.) So this is where I think you're confused. npm is the one who deals with global vs. local modules, and the bottom line is you should always use local modules, like when using node-bindings. The -g flag is for modules that come with some program that you would like in your $PATH (like node-gyp), and that's it. > I'd like to start to understand this better, because I see benefit > (quantifiable in dollars) to maintaining one copy of each module per machine > instead of one copy per app per machine. I'm sure Isaac can preach the philosophy of npm better than I :) There's also this blog article from a while back: http://blog.nodejs.org/2011/03/23/npm-1-0-global-vs-local-installation/ > > Thanks for cluing the noob. > > -- > Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ > Posting guidelines: > https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "nodejs" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected] > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en -- Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ Posting guidelines: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en
