Modernize Distribution

[curran]

From a discussion in https://github.com/jdfekete/reorder.js/issues/1

User story: As a potential user of this library, I would like to see it have a modern and easy to consume distribution, so that I can use it in my project (either via NPM as a dependency, or via some CDN such as JSDelivr or UNPKG).

I suppose the ideal scenario would be a UMD bundle distribution that contains dependencies as well (science, tiny-queue).

[curran]

Suggested approach: replace Makefile with Rollup.

Reference example: https://github.com/rollup/rollup-starter-lib

[curran]

As I dig in a little bit, I am able to run make install and make test.

I notice that the tests are not all passing. Here is the output:

> reorder.js@1.0.7 test /home/curran/repos/reorder.js
> vows --nocolor; echo

·· ·· · ·· ·· ··· ··· · · ··· ·· ··· ·· ·····✗✗✗✗✗✗✗✗✗✗ ·· · ··· ·······  

    order 
      ✗ insert-simple 
      Invalid list, indices not sorted 

      ✗ insert-1 
      Invalid list, indices not sorted 

      ✗ insert-2 
      Invalid list, indices not sorted 

      ✗ insert-3 
      Invalid list, indices not sorted 

      ✗ insert-4 
      Invalid list, indices not sorted 

      ✗ insert-5 
      Invalid list, indices not sorted 

      ✗ insert-6 
      Invalid list, indices not sorted 

      ✗ insert-7 
      Invalid list, indices not sorted 

      ✗ insert-lesssimple 
      Invalid list, indices not sorted 

      ✗ insert-evenharder 
      Invalid list, indices not sorted 
  ✗ Errored » 45 honored ∙ 10 errored (0.604s) 

Is this expected? Or were the tests all passing in the past?

My gut feeling is that the first task should actually be to make sure all the tests pass, then only after that we can go about working on the distribution.

Also, a few notes from initial investigation:

The Makefile concatenates the source files together. Options for moving forward with Rollup include:

• Modifying all source files to use ES6 modules (import and export). This would be a lot of work.

• Setting up Rollup to consume as input the concatenated output from the Makefile. This may be less work, and may be the shortest path to having a modernized distribution.

  Another adjacent thought - if we were to really deeply refresh this library, we could also take a stylistic pass over the codebase and adopt let and const, and arrow function expressions. Also Prettier for code formatting would probably be a good move.

  However, with the tests in a broken state, it does not seem feasible to move forward at all with any of these steps. We need a stable test harness to check what things break and how they break along the way towards modernization.

  Anyone here familiar enough with the failing test cases to maybe taks a stab at making them pass (or removing them if they are not valid tests)?

[curran]

Opened a separate issue for only fixing the tests: #9

[jdfekete]

I have merged the pull requests The new version compiles fine and passes the tests. I will update the README file and acknowledge your work, @curran!

Now, how should the html examples in the examples directory be changed to work again?

[curran]

Ah! The html examples in the examples directory can be made to work again by having them reference the UMD output in dist.

[curran]

Closing this issue as it's essentially done.

Opening a few more as follow-on tasks:

• Fix HTML Examples #11
• Include science in UMD build #12
• Add pretest: build #13
• Publish new distribution to NPM #14