Galata fails to install due to node-canvas

[legendb317]

Description

When using a VPN, the installation of Galata fails due to the canvas dependency failing to install. The install of canvas fails because canvas tries to download from a link during the install process (It seems reasonable that a VPN would block this kind of thing). We have created an issue with canvas which has not had a response since it was opened a few months ago.

Without canvas making any changes, this seems like room to improve Galata to avoid situations like this. Canvas is only used in the benchmarkReporter.ts which uses playwright to benchmark performance in CI. Given that "Galata is a set of helpers and fixtures for JupyterLab UI Testing," it does not seem like benchmark performance test should be shipped with Galata. This will also guarantee that what is being shipped with Galata is as light weight as possible for the people using it.

Another, but less ideal, approach would be to add canvas as an optional dependency in the package.json, so that the install of canvas can fail silently. However, I would want to think that shipping Galata without the benchmarkReporter.ts would be better.

Thanks all for the help with this :)

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[trungleduc]

@fcollonval might have insights about this issue.

[fcollonval]

canvas was added without much thoughts to Galata because it was already a dev dependency of JupyterLab:

=> Found "[email protected]"
info Reasons this module exists
   - "_project_#@jupyterlab#csvviewer" depends on it
   - Hoisted from "_project_#@jupyterlab#csvviewer#canvas"
   - Hoisted from "_project_#@jupyterlab#debugger#canvas"
   - Hoisted from "_project_#@jupyterlab#terminal#canvas"
   - Hoisted from "_project_#@jupyterlab#galata#canvas"

Another, but less ideal, approach would be to add canvas as an optional dependency in the package.json, so that the install of canvas can fail silently. However, I would want to think that shipping Galata without the benchmarkReporter.ts would be better.

I'm more for the opposite (aka setting canvas as optional dep). The main reason is that we have already lots of packages and I don't want to create yet another one for the benchmark helpers. We can then simply switch the benchmark reporter to load asynchronously canvas and not generate a graph if it is not there.

I'll be happy to review a PR.

Note: Using optional dep will also allow to backport the changes and not wait for 4.0 (that will happen if we extract benchmark code from galata).