rage.txt

A Heroku Buildpack for Swift + Perfect
Packaged by Shao Miller <swiftcode@synthetel.com>
2016-03-22 13:25:42 UTC

Heroku is really, really annoying.  It'd be great if all the concerns below
were addressed by easily-accessible documentation.  If it exists, I couldn't
find it.

1. In the usual Buildpack-based process, you don't have super-user powers and
cannot install packages which would otherwise be natively available.  This is
because the stack is locked-down.

2. On the one hand, you can derive your own "stacks" from theirs with your own
stuff integrated, then deploy your stacks, but they do not work with the usual
Buildpack-based process:

  https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/docker

Why don't they?  Why the double-standard of locked-down for #1 and open for #2?

3. The build-path is different than the deploy-path.  The former is a randomly-
generated path and the latter is /app/.  If you rely on a piece of software
that's inflexible in its expectation of paths, this fact really hurts.

As a small example, suppose you wanted to install uuid-dev.  You can't do that
with 'apt-get', so perhaps you take the Heroku cedar-14 stack, deploy it in
your own environment without it being locked-down, install uuid-dev, then take
a "delta" that you might expect to have a low difficulty of migrating to
Heroku.  One of the pieces to adjust is the pkg-config .pc file for uuid-dev.
It contains a 'prefix' variable.  Well this 'prefix' is going to need to be
different in the build environment than in the deployed environment!

Fortunately, the /app/ path is _also_ used in the build environment, so some
kludgery can cause the build environment to more closely resemble the deployed
environment.

Hopefully one of the following occurs:

1. Somebody smarter makes a smarter package
2. This package gets smarter
3. Heroku gets smarter
4. Swift and Perfect get smarter:
   a. Swift ought to inspect environment-variables for -I-like directives
   b. Perfect makefiles and build-processes get less hard-coded about paths