Non-deterministic temporary files left in node_modules #2612
Description
A Makefile is generated during compilation, for example the ffi-napi package leaves a file node_modules/ffi-napi/build/Makefile on the disk.
This file contains an absolute path on the disk, which is non-deterministic: it depends on the setup of the machine where the installation takes place.
As a result, build systems which do incremental re-build/re-test based on distributed caches (such as Bazel) will have a cache miss when this file gets included in the inputs.
As a workaround, Bazel users must delete the build folder from offending packages in a postinstall step to avoid re-building everything that depends on that package.
"scripts": {
"// ": "we must delete non-deterministic outputs from compiling native packages, or they bust the bazel cache",
"postinstall": "rm -rf node_modules/{deasync,iltorb,node-sass}/build node_modules/node-gyp/gyp/pylib/gyp/generator/__pycache__",
}
Instead I think it would be better for node-gyp to clean up its temporary files. (Perhaps a flag can be added for users who want to inspect those files to debug a native compilation)