[Discussion] Yarn & binaries

[brillout]

You mention that Yarn berry is designed to be able to support packages for PHP, Python, Ruby, etc. I was wondering if it's also designed for binaries.

Imagine

{
  "name": "my-app",
  "dependencies": {
    "react": "npm:react@16.8.6",
    "parcel": "github:parcel-bundler/parcel@1.12.3",
    "node": "nix:nodejs@12.2.0",
    "psql": "nix:postgresql@11.3.0"
   }
}

Meaning that yarn install is all I have to do to setup a project, rm -rf path/to/project/repo to remove the project and all it's dependencies, and, with zero-install, yarn stop && git pull && yarn start to deploy to production.

How awesome would that be..

[arcanis]

It would be interesting, for sure! Binaries are an "install" target like many others, and we certainly could support them. In fact, it'll likely be needed at some point if we eventually want to support compiled languages such as C/C++ - where we don't always want to install the packages from source.

One caveat (and I know others are looking to solve it) is that binaries are typically platform-specific. It means that we would need some way to use different "flavors" of packages depending on the host. I have some ideas as to how to fix this (the resolver would ignore any platform-specific information, but the fetcher would extend the resolved data with platform-specific ones), but it'll need to be put to the test 🙂