Package distribution - best practices

[Marat Dukhan]

Hi,

I've ported BLIS library for linear algebra operations to Emscripten, and would like to make it easy to use for other Emscripten users.

What are the best practices for library packaging and package distribution for Emscripten?

I've seen empkg project a while ago, but it doesn't seem to be maintained anymore.

Regards,

Marat

[Jukka Jylänki]

The ultimately preferable route would be to get your changes to the upstream BLIS repository, so people who clone the trunk from them would be Emscripten-ready immediately, and would have the same workflow of obtaining the source as with other platforms. If that's not practical, then we have typically maintained our own fork at github, e.g. https://github.com/juj/emscripten-freetype or https://github.com/gsathya/SDL-emscripten .

There's a plan of adding external library downloads to emsdk, since it already implements package manager functionality, but that hasn't yet been implemented. Also notable is that we don't currently have a strong cross-compiler-version support story for precompiled binaries in Emscripten, and if you e.g. compiled a library with 1.21.0, and migrated to 1.21.1, you should recompile the code fully from sources after updating, so packaging up precompiled versions is generally not very useful.

Perhaps having a BLIS-emscripten repository or similar with Emscripten-specific build README.md would be a good path?

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[Marat Dukhan]

The changes are already in the upstream (and in the last release of BLIS), so maintaining the source repository is not an issue.

My concern is about ease-of-use for other users. Getting through build docs and manually managing the paths might be a high burden for new users, especially the ones who don't have previous experience with native development. The difficulty of using libraries, in turn, is a big disincentive for library devs to provide an Emscripten port. And without a collection of easy-to-use libraries Emscripten would not get as wide adaption as it deserves.

What I'd like to have is an Emscripten's analog of naclports project (which contains ports of different packages for Native Client technology). It is fine if, at least initially, only open source packages would be accepted, and they would need to rebuild with every toolchain update (this is how naclports currently works). If a package manager would provide a universal way to build and install packages, it would be of great benefit for both Emscripten ecosystem and OSS libraries.

Regards,

Marat

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[Alon Zakai]

There has been some discussion here of using the SDK tool to manage libraries, which we would store at https://github.com/emscripten-ports , but work has not started yet. Not sure how naclports work, but maybe that would be similar.

- Alon