Rollup should allow building from source.

[xbjfk]

Feature Use Case

This features is useful for people who are:
a) security conscious and prefer compiling everything from source or
b) have a non-standard system not supported by binary packages provided

Feature Proposal

I would suggest this be implemented with respect to the --build-from-source flag passed to npm, just like node-pre-gyp does: mapbox/node-pre-gyp#8

[lukastaegert]

This would require people to set up a Rust toolchain on their system with the correct nightly version, which is non-trivial. Basically they need to follow the CONTRIBUTING.md file. Not sure if anyone would want to go through that hassle.

You can easily try this out yourself, just install Rollup directly from GitHub, i.e. npm install rollup/rollup#master to install from master.
Using tags, you would be able to install any specific version from GitHub that way, e.g. npm i rollup/rollup#v4.12.1.

[xbjfk]

Hey, sorry it took so long for me to get back to you - I appreciate you response.

This would require people to set up a Rust toolchain on their system with the correct nightly version, which is non-trivial.

I absolutely agree, and I think the default should be the binaries.

The main problem I'm having is none of the binary versions run on my system; as you suggested, I tried to compile from git - but from what I can tell it depends on a previous version of rollup to build (?) - which won't run on my system - the .node file successfully compiled however. Is there any way to bootstrap rollup without a previous version of rollup?

It would also be nice not to manage npm overrides for the git version, but I'm focused on getting any version running natively for now.

[lukastaegert]

Building Rollup without Rollup would indeed be something nice. I wonder if we could create a bootstrap build using https://www.npmjs.com/package/vite-node, but this would still rely on the native code of esbuild for the TypeScript conversion and would probably not solve your problems.

[xbjfk]

Actually, I think it might solve my problem, since I am able to compile esbuild from scratch (with go build) - I'm pretty sure esbuild does not need to be bootstrapped.

[Kreijstal]

Building Rollup without Rollup would indeed be something nice. I wonder if we could create a bootstrap build using https://www.npmjs.com/package/vite-node, but this would still rely on the native code of esbuild for the TypeScript conversion and would probably not solve your problems.

Reminds me of https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-building-from-source-all-the-way-down/

[Et7f3]

May I ask @xbjfk what is your OS triplet ? Do you want I cross compile a reproducible rollup (in CI so you can trust binary)