Evaluate switching / upgrading package manager (for development)

[bd82]

This project currently uses Yarn 1.x which is no longer developed.

The two primary options are:

• Upgrade to yarn 3.x
• Switch to pnpm.

I recently played with pnpm and was quite impressed, it may be the first candidate to try out.

[NaridaL]

How about plain NPM :-)

[bd82]

NPM seems to always be behind features wise and performance wise, e.g:

• They recently implemented workspaces, but Yarn has already moved to Plug&Play and pnpm supports both a linking approach.

Because NPM (different versions) comes pre-bundled with node installations it might make it more difficult to manage
and lock a specific NPM version for the project (There may be some tools to help with that...).

[NaridaL]

Do we need any of the other features? As there aren't many dependencies, I don't thing performance is an issue.

If maintainability is a priority, I think just using NPM is the easiest as everyone knows how that works.

[bd82]

We need workspaces for the mono repo.

That is supported is in npm 7.x, however nodejs 12 and 14 come pre-bundled with older versions of npm.
And I am not sure how to enforce all npm commands inside a specific directory (this repo) will always run with a specified npm version.

Other things I found useful in other projects were: (not currently needed here).

• Yarn's nohoist feature (not yet implemented in npm)
• pnpm's override feature.

Still it should be possible to switch to using only npm.
However, I am biased as imho yarn/pnpm are the better tools, and have been for multiple years now.
So I am not likely to invest effort in the npm route.

But I still want to modernize the repo as we are currently using an old release of yarn

• also looking towards replacing Lerna as it is mostly un-maintained nowadays.

[NaridaL]

You can add package.json engines.npm for the npm version

[bd82]

You can add package.json engines.npm for the npm version

But would chevrotain developers need to do npm install -g [email protected] every time the switch to this repo's dir?

Yarn has a mechanism to lock the binary version per specific project.
Pnpm does not have such a mechanism afaik, but it is less of an issue as there are fewer projects that depend on legacy pnpm versions (at least for me).

I know there are 3rd party tools that can help with managing the binaries per project (volta/nvm).
But that just leads to a new set of problems with those tools.

It nothing unsolvable, but imho just an additional annoyance/cost for using a less powerful npm CLI tool
so its kind of a lose/lose proposition imho. 😄

[arcanis]

Just noticing this thread by pure hasard, while evaluating using Chevrotain to replace one of the PEG.js-based parser in Yarn. If you're interested to upgrade to 3.x, feel free to ping me on the Yarn discord, I'd be happy to answer questions 🙂

[bd82]

Big Thanks @arcanis 😄

It is not planned anytime soon, and mostly depends more on when I've got both free time and the "muse" for upgrading the dev-ops related things. But a direct channel for questions can only help 👍

I'll ping you on discord 🏓

[bd82]

Yarn now has a pnpm linker option which could be useful is there are compatibility issues with some tools that do not play well with the default pnp linker.

• Implements the pnpm linker yarnpkg/berry#3338