Add support for building LFS or SPIFFS images?

[nwf]

It would be useful, I think, if we could pick at least in-tree lua_modules directly into a LFS image as part of the firmware bundle. This would lower the friction of jettisoning some "somewhat hairy" C modules in favor of Lua+C hybrids as I've been trying to drive us to (e.g. nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware#2819 and now nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware#3126).

However, I understand if there's hesitation to do LFS builds because people might want to add their own modules, and that opens "now I need to let people upload files" which is always a little hair-raising on the web. So...

Maybe instead of LFS, landing selected lua_modules in SPIFFS would still be useful. They could still be require-d as is, at the cost of increased memory consumption, and given @TerryE's proposal in nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware#2917, having Lua files in SPIFFS would eventually let us tell people how to compile their LFS images on-module.

[marcelstoer]

I doubt I fully understand the issue as LFS has been supported for a long time thanks to @HHHartmann : https://github.com/marcelstoer/docker-nodemcu-build#create-an-lfs-image-for-esp8266

[nwf]

Argh, I was apparently not completely awake when I filed this one. I meant for this to be about the web builder. -_-

Is there an appropriate issue tracker this should move to?

[marcelstoer]

The correct list would be https://github.com/marcelstoer/nodemcu-custom-build/issues (open-source backend of the cloud builder).