955988 - [meta] Running build scripts on node.js

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::Build, defect)

Comment 1

[Yuren [:yurenju] (AFK ~ Oct. 12) (volunteer mode)]

we should have a integration test case for each build script and then we can running that test case on  node.js & xpcshell

Comment 2

[Yuren [:yurenju] (AFK ~ Oct. 12) (volunteer mode)]

Ricky, this is the bug for node.js

Comment 3

[Tim Guan-tin Chien [:timdream] (please needinfo)]

This bug no longer receives priority, removing blocking of bug 908549 (and migration to blocking-b2g: backlog)

Comment 4

[Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau]]

It has been a long time since I touched gaia, and it looks like we are replacing xpcshell issues with some others related to node.
Various contributors keeps saying in the mailing list, there is many edge cases.

The nodejs version checker is great. It would be even better to provide a link to the mdn page that tells us more about that (which provide a useful link to install it!).

It would be great to also do a clang checker!! This is from from being obvious when npm fails during any of our make target.

Also, npm/node comes with tons of possible failures. It would be great to have a dedicated page with all possible failures and ways to get rid of them. Like all these node version issue, clang (or other possibly missing dependencies). Also I had to wipe ~/.npm/ because of some error in random package.json manifest... And if we could, displaying a link to this page anytime something fails would be even better!

Comment 5

[Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau]]

Also, README file is completely outdated and doesn't help there. I filled bug 1238501 about that.

Comment 6

[Ricky Chien [:rickychien] (inactive)]

Sure, I'll take over this documentation for Gaia build once node.js migration is complete.

Comment 7

[Ricky Chien [:rickychien] (inactive)]

I'd like to mark meta bug resolved since our target plan on [1] are already fixed. However, b2g project will deliver to community soon. 

There are some things we haven't done yet before enabling node build system by default:

1. Performance issue - running build system on node is slower than on xpcshell:
  1. Spawn multi-process is slow - Node's child_process is cumbersome than nsIProcess on xpcshell, but the root cause is hard to be addressed without fixing performance issue within node.js. However, we could leverage NPM multi-thread libraries to manage multi-thread in a pool (depends on CPU cores) that would improve performance issue.
  2. Requirejs on node is slow [2] - Due to performance compared between Esprima.js [3] and native Spidermonkey parser, causing Spidermonkey parser wins in this area a lot. However, I found [5] that there is a huge performance regression and that might be a chance to improve if someone is free to take a look and replace esprima with acorn parser.

2. We just make sure all changes don't break `make RUN_ON_NODE=1`, `make RUN_ON_NODE=1 GAIA_OPTIMIZE=1` and `make reset-gaia RUN_ON_NODE=1` but haven't verified for other build flags yet.

Node.js build system will be able to enable by default after above things are done.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gaia/Build/RefactoringToNodejs
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1131468#c5
[3] http://esprima.org/
[4] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/SpiderMonkey/Parser_API
[5] https://github.com/jrburke/r.js/issues/850