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by wereHamster 29 days ago
After I upgraded pnpm to v11, I set all allowBuilds to false and have not observed any failures. Made me wonder why the packages even need build scripts. My guess is for obscure or old platforms, but for most users running on Linux or Darwin build scripts seem to be unnecessary.
2 comments
n_e 29 days ago
> Made me wonder why the packages even need build scripts

As the name implies it's for building stuff. Most (all?) packages that use C++ FFI with node-gyp need it. A popular package that needs it is re2.

Many newer packages bundle prebuilt native code as transitive dependencies, so build scripts are less needed than before.

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Tade0 29 days ago
> Made me wonder why the packages even need build scripts.

Historically it was to accommodate packages like the original SASS compiler:

https://sass-lang.com/ruby-sass/

Other times it was to avoid shipping binaries due to, erm, safety concerns. The package would include code in a different language, which in turn would compile into a binary library or executable.

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