Idea: support building from source

[chriskrycho]

I imagine the scenario where you want to build from source will be pretty rare in the long run, but it occurred to me that it could be handy on occasions. Say, when going through an architecture transition, such that it's possible to build from source but there isn't a distribution available otherwise yet. But also for folks who want both reproducibility and follow particular security practices, etc.

This is definitely not something I would put high on the priority list, just occurred to me this evening after seeing mention of nvm supporting it.

[charlespierce]

For building from source, are you talking about different Node versions? Or Volta itself? I'm guessing since you mention nvm supporting it you mean building a Node version from source. I imagine it's not that difficult with the caveat that you would need to already have the build toolchain installed on your system.

[chriskrycho]

Oh, good clarification; as you surmised I meant building Node from source.

[songhn233]

The feature building node from source expects to be added, like nvm install 14 -s

The main scenario I encountered is that the current project does not yet support Node 16 or above, and needs Node 14 under the arm architecture to build native dependencies for Electron.