dtrace optional? about node-triton

[trentm]

@lloydde just confirming: you get the same with 'npm install smartdc' right?

[dwlf]

@trentm sorry, already installed mac command line tools and npm installed again.

[trentm]

@lloydde I don't know what you mean. Could you please try this:

mkdir play
cd play
npm init .     # take all the defaults here
npm install smartdc

Do you get the same error with dtrace-provider building?

[dwlf]

@trentm at the time of my issue, I didn't have "mac xcode or mac command line tools installed" (see initial comment), I now do.

[trentm]

Ah, I see. Thanks.

[bahamas10]

has this been resolved?

[trentm]

@bahamas10 No. I don't have a great answer here. Bunyan has been rounds on whether to make dtrace-provider an optional dependency... almost always because of build failures. A while back those cases were fixed/worked-around by having the dtrace-provider build not fail on non-dtrace-y platforms and to be very silent (it was noisy in that case for a while).

This is a new case: dtrace-y platform, no build tools. I'm guessing that Mac is going to be the only common such case. While I would hope that the set of those using Mac, interested in Triton, and not having the Xcode CLI tools installed is smaller... I don't think we can discount it.

I'm hesitant to make it an optional dep for bunyan. From a pure bunyan-advocate p.o.v., making dtrace-provider optional means that failures to build won't get noticed/reported... the dtrace features of bunyan will suffer.

The only solutions I see:

1. have bunyan make dtrace-provider and optional dep
2. have bunyan depend on a "dtrace-provider-if-can" fork (the name could be whatever, or could consider trying to get it upstreamed) that would allow certain kinds of failures. The single starting case would be Mac not having the build chain. Perhaps emit a warning and move on
3. binary built modules support in npm core :)

[trentm]

I suppose a mitigation might be to look into avoiding the runtime warnings and just have the install time noise.