Dependencies vs subdependencies

[dkniffin]

I'm just starting to use importmap-rails now. I noticed when I run importmap pin xyz, if xyz has sub-dependencies, they get pinned too.

When I'm looking at my config/importmap.rb file, how do I distinguish what is one of my direct dependencies, vs what is a subdependency?

Also, what happens if two of my dependencies require different version of the same sub-dependency? Is that up to me to manage?

[dkniffin]

As I've been exploring importmap-rails usage more, I've been testing this simple solution:

pin "flickity", to: "https://ga.jspm.io/npm:[email protected]/js/index.js"
  pin "ev-emitter", to: "https://ga.jspm.io/npm:[email protected]/ev-emitter.js"
  pin "fizzy-ui-utils", to: "https://ga.jspm.io/npm:[email protected]/utils.js"
    pin "desandro-matches-selector", to: "https://ga.jspm.io/npm:[email protected]/matches-selector.js"
  pin "get-size", to: "https://ga.jspm.io/npm:[email protected]/get-size.js"
  pin "imagesloaded", to: "https://ga.jspm.io/npm:[email protected]/imagesloaded.js"
  pin "unidragger", to: "https://ga.jspm.io/npm:[email protected]/unidragger.js"
  pin "unipointer", to: "https://ga.jspm.io/npm:[email protected]/unipointer.js"

Basically, just indent sub-dependencies inside the dependency. Simple.

However, this goes against Rubocop conventions, so I had to add # rubocop:disable Layout/IndentationConsistency.

It also breaks lines like this and this which depend on pin being at the very start of the line. It might break other things I haven't discovered yet.

But the most important downside to this is that it means I have to manually manage the indentation, which works if I have a small number of packages, but for a lot it would get messy.

I would love to see sub-dependencies either abstracted somehow so they're not shown at all inside config/importmap.rb, or have this indentation style officially supported via blocks, or have another option for managing these.

[dkniffin]

@dhh can you explain why you marked this as complete? I don't see any recent commits adding this functionality, but maybe I missed something.

[dhh]

Should have included a comment. This is beyond the scope of what importmap can/should offer in my opinion. We are not a full-featured package manager. Multiple packages can share the same root dependencies, and we don't have any way of representing that with this setup.

[dkniffin]

Looping back here to mention that I created a gem to add this functionality: https://github.com/quimbee/importmap-package-manager It lets you separate your library imports into a separate config/importmap_packages.yml (which has allows defining version specs), then run rake importmap_package_manager:update to generate/update a config/importmap-packages-lock.rb file (which includes the sub-dependencies), which gets included in the importmap.