npm WARN optional dep failed, continuing fsevents@0.3.1

[Mohan Radhakrishnan]

Hello,

 

Cross-posted from Karma.

 

This does not stop karma from working on my Win 7 32-bit. Wondering what it means here because on my Mac 'node-gyp' actually built after I updated my XCode for Mavericks. I mean that on the Mac I saw the same error initially but after my XCode update 'node-gyp' was built and this error vanished.

Thanks,

Mohan

$ npm install -g karma
npm WARN optional dep failed, continuing fsev...@0.3.1
/

> w...@0.4.32 install C:\Users\476458\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\karma\node_
modules\socket.io\node_modules\socket.io-client\node_modules\ws
> (node-gyp rebuild 2> builderror.log) || (exit 0)

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Dec 29, 2014, at 7:38 AM, Mohan Radhakrishnan wrote:

> This does not stop karma from working on my Win 7 32-bit. Wondering what it means here because on my Mac 'node-gyp' actually built after I updated my XCode for Mavericks. I mean that on the Mac I saw the same error initially but after my XCode update 'node-gyp' was built and this error vanished.
> Thanks,
> Mohan
> $ npm install -g karma
> npm WARN optional dep failed, continuing fsev...@0.3.1

FSEvents is an API only available on OS X:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSEvents

It is understandable therefore that the fsevents npm module which provides a node interface to that OS API cannot be built on systems other than OS X, and that other software that wants to use fsevents on OS X would have planned for that contingency and provided an alternate implementation for other systems. In the case of karma, it appears to have been handled by making fsevents an optional dependency.