feat: Can jekyll-sass-converter be made an optional installation? (sassc install is slow)

[thbar]

Thanks for your work on Jekyll!

Currently, jekyll-sass-converter is installed by default (hard dependency), and it brings sassc as a dependency. The installation of sassc can be very slow (ex here more than 3 minutes on a given Netlify build.

Although the real fix would be to accelerate sassc installation (sass/sassc-ruby#189), it will take time and effort.

Therefore I wonder if it could be done to make jekyll-sass-converter a soft requirement?

Thanks for taking this input into consideration ^_^

[ashmaroli]

Unfortunately, we cannot remove a hard dependency. Our next release will be v4.1.0 (minor-version bump) and removing a hard dependency in a minor version bump is against the principles of semver (Semantic Versioning).

Sorry, you'll have to depend on Netlify's caching (albeit apparent lack of one for preview-deploys).

[Robbie-Cook]

I hope you all see this as the absolute disaster that it is for Jekyll. Slow builds are a huge reason for jumping ship re: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/10/to-eleventy-and-beyond/

[fauno]

to add to this, there's an issue open in sassc about providing a binary gem: sass/sassc-ruby#189 for our projects we've set up a gem repository hosting our own binary gems using gem-compiler, for alpine/musl, which lead to finding some quirks on how rubygems finds platform specific gems for linux+glibc: rubygems/rubygems#3174 i tried building binary gems for glibc but since we're using rbenv for development, libraries end up hardcoding local directories and i haven't had time to fix it. maybe a first step would be helping sassc to provide a binary gem officially, that would reduce build times for everyone :)

[ashmaroli]

@Robbie-Cook The build time referred to in the Mozilla blog post is the time Jekyll took during multiple build sessions (i.e., from running jekyll build or jekyll serve both of which comprises of reading the source files, converting and finally writing the HTML files to disk.)
That time has nothing to do with sassc gem or jekyll-sass-converter installation.
Gems are ideally installed once in a while, and not for every build session.

[typhoon2099]

Is this still not an option? We don't use sass in our project but still have to wait an extra 3 minutes on each Netlify build to include sassc, despite not needing it.