Random build failures due to fs-extra defect

[brody4hire]

Random build failures due to fs-extra defect in: jprichardson/node-fs-extra#657

reported by @oliversalzburg in apache/cordova-common#64

also discussed in the following places:

• CB-14140 Switch to using fs-extra in favour of shelljs cordova-lib#613 (comment)
• Error Messages: [Source and destination must not be the same.] in cordova-android@8.0.0 cordova-android#692 / Source and destination must not be the same. cordova-android#693

The discussion is already in apache/cordova-common#64. I suspect we should keep it there for now. I think this issue needs to be reported and tracked at the top level since it affects multiple Cordova packages.

[oliversalzburg]

I really hope we can find a solution in fs-extra, but the maintainers are having a hard time deciding on what the right path to go is and there seems to be no hurry to work out a solution.

I previously had a similar experience when I tried to resolve the "link copy" issue, which is still open.

If someone has a suggestion on how to mitigate this issue in Cordova, I'd be glad to hear it. I currently see no other option than to implement a separate copy command that doesn't have an inode equality check (or a proper one). Which would be disappointing as that's the opposite of what you want when using such a library.

[brody4hire]

I can think of a couple ideas:

• try using built-in fs.copySync from Node.js (I cannot tell if it would break anything else or not without some testing and analysis)
• publish a new "copy" or "copy-sync" package with the JavaScript that does what we want

[dimitriscsd]

How is this coming along? Any decisions been taken? Fs extra is about to release v8 with apparently a workaround for this issue.

[brody4hire]

Please take a look at the recent comments in apache/cordova-common#64, where you should see the answer so far.

If we do incorporate a new fs-extra release, I suspect we would do a pipelined release of a number of components including cordova-common, some if not all Cordova platform components, cordova-lib, and cordova-cli.

[brody4hire]

I am now closing this issue as a duplicate of #121 which was just transferred from cordova-common.