olebedev
commented
1 year ago It seems to be adding ecosystem capability in the same space than js2nix.
Yeah, it seems kind of like that, but from my understanding it substitute NPM with Nix, try to mimic some behavior. I am not entirely sure here, the readme is a bit vague, unfortunately. The placebo term in the context of NPM is not entirely clear to me.
Anyways, with js2nix it's possible to substitute some packages with dummy implementations if required for some of workflows, via overlays.
I heard about the author, he created node2nix and I am full of respect to that work, node2nix is definitely trying to do similar things on the field where js2nix operates.
The project looks like it tries to provide NPM registry agnostic local cache to make the NPM happy with that. This is something that can help with installations of the Node.js modules but not the model that js2nix is trying to adopt. js2nix allows you convert package.json & yarn.lock files into a first-class citizen Nix derivation set, where you don't care about yarn executable to install the Node.js modules anymore but shift this ti Nix entirely.
https://github.com/svanderburg/placebo-npm had been brought to my attention and I don't want to hold private the knowledge of its existence.
It seems to be adding ecosystem capability in the same space than js2nix.