Eliminate native dependencies #577
Description
Because of the bufferutil and utf-8-validate dependencies in ws, many users see cryptic errors when installing ws or anything that depends on it.
Here's an example: "I can't build torrent-stream on my machine. It complains about MSB3428 (visual c++) when triggering node-gyp."
Here's another example, from my machine:
> [email protected] install /usr/local/lib/node_modules/webtorrent/node_modules/torrent-discovery/node_modules/bittorrent-tracker/node_modules/ws/node_modules/bufferutil
> node-gyp rebuild
xcode-select: error: tool 'xcodebuild' requires Xcode, but active developer directory '/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools' is a command line tools instance
xcode-select: error: tool 'xcodebuild' requires Xcode, but active developer directory '/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools' is a command line tools instance
CXX(target) Release/obj.target/bufferutil/src/bufferutil.o
SOLINK_MODULE(target) Release/bufferutil.node
> [email protected] install /usr/local/lib/node_modules/webtorrent/node_modules/torrent-discovery/node_modules/bittorrent-tracker/node_modules/ws/node_modules/utf-8-validate
> node-gyp rebuild
xcode-select: error: tool 'xcodebuild' requires Xcode, but active developer directory '/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools' is a command line tools instance
xcode-select: error: tool 'xcodebuild' requires Xcode, but active developer directory '/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools' is a command line tools instance
CXX(target) Release/obj.target/validation/src/validation.o
SOLINK_MODULE(target) Release/validation.node
Keep in mind for that last example of error spew, I actually have the OS X command line tools installed. Apparently, a compiler toolchain is still not enough. You actually need to install an IDE – Xcode. This is unreasonable.
It's true that these are optional dependencies... but npm's UX is really bad here. Error messages are displayed to the end user so they usually think something went wrong during installation. I keep getting asked about this.
The optional deps make it really hard to depend on ws in command line tools that normal users (i.e. not module authors) will be installing.
Can we discuss how we might eliminate these native dependencies?