balena-cli: init at <Updating>

[doronbehar]

Motivation for this change

Add balena-cli - a CLI tool to manage balena's devices and apps.

Things done

• Tested using sandboxing (nix.useSandbox on NixOS, or option sandbox in nix.conf on non-NixOS linux)
• Built on platform(s)
  • NixOS
  • macOS
  • other Linux distributions
• Tested via one or more NixOS test(s) if existing and applicable for the change (look inside nixos/tests)
• Tested compilation of all pkgs that depend on this change using nix-shell -p nixpkgs-review --run "nixpkgs-review wip"
• Tested execution of all binary files (usually in ./result/bin/)
• Determined the impact on package closure size (by running nix path-info -S before and after)
• Ensured that relevant documentation is up to date
• Fits CONTRIBUTING.md.

[doronbehar]

Apparently, their updates are rather frequent, so this package should have it's own ./generate.sh script that will do it all, only for this package. This will reduce the probable merge conflicts of updating it among too many other node packages. I'm converting to draft as the current, newer build fails with:

npm ERR! syscall chmod
npm ERR! path /nix/store/2m8cziwx735scqdqs81081z4dwxyxzqi-node_balena-cli-12.14.18/lib/node_modules/balena-cli/bin/balena
npm ERR! errno -2
npm ERR! enoent ENOENT: no such file or directory, chmod '/nix/store/2m8cziwx735scqdqs81081z4dwxyxzqi-node_balena-cli-12.14.18/lib/node_modules/balena-cli/bin/balena'
npm ERR! enoent This is related to npm not being able to find a file.
npm ERR! enoent 

npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR!     /build/.npm/_logs/2020-09-06T08_41_48_435Z-debug.log

[doronbehar]

Now it's working.

[doronbehar]

DAMN, so many people got subscribed. Sorry. Now I used cherry-pick instead of rebase and I hope it's fine.

[jonringer]

is there a way to just update the global node packages, instead of having a 12k application-specific deps file?

[doronbehar]

is there a way to just update the global node packages, instead of having a 12k application-specific deps file?

484K* 😆 :

$ du -csh pkgs/development/tools/balena-cli
484K

It is possible, but their releases are so frequent, so I'm not sure how to handle this - putting it in the general nodePackages set would mean the updates it'll receive will be very infrequent. OTH, I'm not installing this tool imperatively via npm -g install because it is compiled.

Maybe we should improve the nodePackages ecosystem so it wouldn't be that hard to get changes into Nixpkgs. IDK.

[jonringer]

I think in a year-or-two, we might just be using flakes for applications like this. So that nixpkgs is small and stable. And then just opt-in to flakes that have large dependency sets.

[nixos-discourse]

This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/call-for-nodepackages-maintainers/9176/27

[stale]

I marked this as stale due to inactivity. → More info

[doronbehar]

I'll close this as it seems not suitable for nixpkgs with their release model and our nodejs system. In the future this project will be available using the flake https://gitlab.com/doronbehar/nixNodeJSPkgs .