Toolchains key no longer recognized

[mitsuhiko]

With the upgrade to volta the key toolchains key became volta. Yet everything in the docs still points to toolchains and the volta key is completely undocumented other than in the announcement post.

There is absolutely no upgrade path without having to add both volta and toolchains to the package.json now and since it's now a volta specific key there is not even a point in having it in the package.json any more.

At this point if this is not going to turn into a standardized upon key it would be preferrable to instead have a .voltarc file which would also solve some of the docker concerns: #282

[mitsuhiko]

It would be preferrable to have a point release of volta to temporarily still accept toolchains to support a reasonable upgrade flow. Also if toolchains is gone for good the docs need updating.

[chriskrycho]

Thanks for the feedback. I opened volta-cli/website#19 to fix the docs issue. You may also want to track the progress of volta-cli/rfcs#33 and the implementing issue, #411, which relate to supporting an external file.

For history on the change from toolchain to volta, please see the discussion in #412 and #413.

As regards the change: this is a breaking change, and we understand there's some churn here, but it should be fairly painless. (See the full list of changes in the RELEASES.md file!)

[mitsuhiko]

As regards the change: this is a breaking change and was noted as such in the RELEASES.md file.

It's a breaking change but without any path towards resolving it. This means that for a project using volta one now needs to get the new key into the package.json in master, then have all pending PRs get master merged in and only then people can start moving over. There is no reasonable way this upgrade can be performed from what I can tell. This is really painful. Users can't update to volta until both keys are in the codebase for some period of time.

[chriskrycho]

We totally get the frustration there! I'm looking to see if we can provide a good path where we cut a 0.5.1 that supports toolchain but warns that it's deprecated; hopefully that will unblock you. 😅

[rwjblue]

It's a breaking change but without any path towards resolving it. This means that for a project using volta one now needs to get the new key into the package.json in master, then have all pending PRs get master merged in and only then people can start moving over. There is no reasonable way this upgrade can be performed from what I can tell.

Yes, I think you are right.

This is really painful.

I agree, I am sorry that we didn't have a better path laid out here. Thank you for bringing it up.

I think bringing back the support for toolchain with a warning as a fallback when volta is not present is a good (hopefully small) change to make for a 0.5.1.