dfinity / vessel

The original package manager for Motoko
Apache License 2.0
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Add optional `devDependencies` field in `vessel.dhall` #61

Open rvanasa opened 2 years ago

rvanasa commented 2 years ago

This PR introduces the ability to specify local "dev dependencies" (well-known from Cargo and npm) for a Vessel package.

Here's a concise explanation of dev dependencies from Rust by Example:

Sometimes there is a need to have dependencies for tests (or examples, or benchmarks) only. These dependencies are not propagated to other packages which depend on this package.

As a response to https://github.com/dfinity/vscode-motoko/issues/66, this feature would provide a simpler alternative to the ./vessel.dhall + test/vessel.dhall pattern used in various official and community repositories (e.g. motoko-base). The goal is to improve readability for both humans and development tools (especially IDE integrations).

This PR also make it possible to omit fields in a vessel.dhall manifest. For instance, it's no longer necessary to write verbose default values such as compiler = None Text, which I expect will be appreciated by the community. :)

rvanasa commented 2 years ago

A few points of discussion:

By switching to a single vessel.dhall file, it would be possible to accidentally include transitive dev dependencies in the package itself, leading to unexpected downstream compile errors.

Vessel originally used strict type checking for Dhall files, which means that this PR (and any other change to vessel.dhall or package-set.dhall) is necessarily backwards incompatible.

matthewhammer commented 2 years ago

... necessarily backwards incompatible.

Bummer.

Perhaps we could combine this with some additional improvements and make this into a "Vessel 1.0" release?

I'm supportive of that.

We could also use this as an opportunity to simplify installation and updates by switching to a new distribution method (such as dfx, an npm package, and/or bundling into the Motoko VS Code extension).

I'm also supportive of these other distribution methods.

I think dfx (or whatever packages the compiler in each context) makes the most sense to me. It never made sense to me to separate the package manager and the compiler as much as they've been separated thus far.