Re: [Buildroot] [PATCH 2/2] package/sass: new package

On Fri Aug 7, 2026 at 1:55 PM CEST, Thomas Perale wrote:
> Hi Thomas, Alexis,
>
>> I am not super clear on what sass exactly does/is. But some time ago,
>> we dropped all JS libraries from Buildroot:
>> 
>>   https://lore.kernel.org/buildroot/[email protected]/
>> 
>> But sass doesn't seem to be one of those static JS libraries I guess
>> because it installs some executable host tool?
>
> If I remember correctly node-sass is build using node-gyp so I can make sense
> to have it in Buildroot because the node-sass version is closely related to the
> node version present in Buildroot.

Just to make sure we are talking about the same thing, this package is
not introducing node-sass ([1]), which is deprecated, but sass ([2])

> The question is how do you plan to use 'node-sass' once you have the executable.
> Correct me if I'm wrong but I guess the goal here is to use it in another
> Buildroot package that represent a "webapp" and you run 'node-sass'
> in the build step of that package and then place the generate css in the
> correct location ?

Correct. To be exact, sass is not currently called directly by the
custom buildroot package for "webapp". "webapp" is a php project, using
composer to install and run "mini-asset" ([3]) which is a bundler
depending on uglify and sass binaries being present on host.

> The correct way handle this (and minification) would probably be to use a
> dedicated JavaScript bundler and configure it to use node-sass and setup
> minification. This would probably yield smaller bundles and help handle
> versioning correctly for your webapp.
> This was also the thinking in dropping the JS libraries from Buildroot.
>
> If you have a `package.json` for the webapp with the node-sass dependency. Can
> you `npm install` the webapp dependencies using the buildroot 'npm'
> host-package without errors ? If that's the case I would say that it is
> probably a better solution.

So in this case I've got no package.json, I only have a composer.json
requiring mini_asset, and mini_asset does not automatically pull those
dependencies. Mini-asset is configured through a .ini file, in which we
can use different "filters" (eg: Sass), and each filter has different
requirements, but it is up to the user to bring those dependencies on
host. One thing that I can check however, close to your suggestion, is
whether there is a different CSS "filter" that could be brought
automatically by composer and that generates something close to what
"webapp" is currently outputting.

Alexis

>
> Best regards,
> PERALE Thomas

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-sass
[2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/sass
[3] https://github.com/markstory/mini-asset




-- 
Alexis Lothoré, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com

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