TooTallNate/node-gyp — Issue #11: Complexity concern
Author: paddybyers
Created: 2012-02-07 23:52:10+00:00
State: open

I don't like to stir things up, but I'm concerned that this is building layers of complexity on top of something that should be really simple and, more than anything, needs to be completely transparent to the developer.

All I really want to be able to do is to do

gyp (some options I understand) mymodule.gyp

Perhaps a script can take away the need to add the options. This node-gyp seems to be going more into the direction of being an autotools - which has the superficial allure of being super-intelligent and automatic, but in fact makes things harder because everything becomes that bit more obscure for the developer, and the only build options I get are the ones that the tool chose to give me, instead of the ones that are supported by the underlying utilities.

Already looking at this I don't know, wlthout looking in detail, whether or not I can use the xcode generator; or what options it can and cannot pass to gyp, for example. Or what option to give it to see exactly what gyp command is being generated, or to see what the complete compiler/linker commands are.

Added to all of that, we still have the issue that gyp itself is not mature, and you often end up having to debug gyp when you first try to do something new. That becomes a lot harder when you're trying to tell it what to do from the other side of this stack.