Hi Guix, after a few days of frustrating investigation I found a bug in one of the libraries used by npm:
https://github.com/npm/pacote/issues/285 The result is that “npm install” will not install *all* files dependent on whether a file is deduplicated in the store. This causes irreproducible output and build failures down the line on different systems depending on the state of the file system. We should patch this ourselves. We can either tell node-tar not to mark up hardlinks with the “Link” type, or we can patch pacote to not skip files that have the “Link” type. I’ve tested this little addition to the build phases of node-lts on an affected system: --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- (add-after 'install 'do-not-ignore-links (lambda* (#:key outputs #:allow-other-keys) (with-directory-excursion (string-append (assoc-ref outputs "out") "/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules") (substitute* "pacote/lib/fetcher.js" (("\\/Link\\$\\/.test\\(entry.type\\)") "false") (("\\/File\\$\\/.test\\(entry.type\\)") "/(File|Link)$/.test(entry.type)")) --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- What do you think? -- Ricardo
