3
slar
5y

Has OSS Projects build systems become more complicated lately?

I took a stab at building concourse ci on FreeBSD. It being written in go, I expected it to be rather straight forward but no.

To "compile" the web UI assets, yarn (an alternative nodejs package manager apparently) was required. (Are js and CSS really compile targets now?)

Installed yarn and ran yarn build, it complained about lessc not being installed, so ran yarn install lessc which then told me that I was running an unsupported operating system.

I can compile the actual consourse binary just fine, but without yarn doing it's thing the assets required for the web UI does not get compiled in and therefore doesn't work properly.

Maybe I compile the web UI assets in Linux, and cross compile my FreeBSD binary...

Comments
  • 0
    The usual things happening.
  • 3
    Frontend is an insanely overcomplicated clusterfuck.
  • 2
    Yes, both js and css is compile targets.

    Less is one standard for writing css with “less” code, less repetitions.

    And with js there is es6 that is the latest js standard but it is bot supported in all browsers so you compile it to code that works around deficiencies in older browsers.

    Less should be available, you can the compiler under node.

    But yes, compilation is getting more complex, not just for OSS.
  • 0
    Same experience with FreeBSD here: As it quite uncommon, nobody takes time to test their software for it, especially smaller projects.
  • 2
    There so many tools to simplify difficult things that it has become impossible to do simple things easily.
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