[Buildbot-devel] Questions on buildbot_www package (nine branch)

[Andrii Senkovych]

Hi,

Yesterday I had some fun building the new web frontend for buildbot.
While I managed to run master and display some neat pages, i had some
troubles during build as well (see bug #2571). I'm not familiar with
frontend development, but I'd like to understand how this works since
i'm going to package this for Debian once new web interface is ready.
So I'd better prepare before this happens, because I already expect a
lot of work on packaging. Here are my questions:

 * what is a general layout of the AngularJS project (and buildobt_www) and
 * what is its typical workflow

Also I've found that it required to download 152Mb of thirdparty
libraries to be downloaded by npm and bower to build a 350K javascript
file at the end. That's quite impressive :) But this could be quite a
challenge for Debian, because:

 * it tends to satisfy all build-dependencies system-wide
 * it requires all packages to be built from source
 * it has /usr/bin/nodejs instead of /usr/bin/node

Currently I doubt that python_www sdist tarball will fit to the second
condition (due to minified/uglified javascript code compiled from
coffeescript, etc.) that moves me to point that Debian package would
require nodejs and npm as its build dependencies. And this moves to
the first condition. However I'm not that happy to imagine packaging
of that 152Mb of different javascript code into Debian packages.

Another potential issue for me is node.js itself, because it is
installed as /usr/bin/nodejs and not /usr/bin/node like the upstream
one. Here's explanation from the respective package readme file:

> The upstream name for the Node.js interpreter command is "node".
> In Debian the interpreter command has been changed to "nodejs".
>
> This was done to prevent a namespace collision: other commands use
> the same name in their upstreams, such as ax25-node from the "node"
> package.
>
> Scripts calling Node.js as a shell command must be changed to instead
> use the "nodejs" command.

I already had some problems while building buildbot_www due to this
issue (fixed with a symlink for now).

I'm going to start similar conversation on Debian mailing list to
clarify all the points on packaging. If you have any thoughts on this,
I'd like to hear them.

Thanks.

-- 
Best regards,
Andriy Senkovych