Feedback requested: improving Infusion's NPM package for end users in the short term

[Justin Obara]

To add to Alan’s points, I’m linking in FLUID-5579 which was an issue filed
a couple years ago covering a similar concern.

https://issues.fluidproject.org/browse/FLUID-5579

Thanks
Justin


On August 18, 2016 at 10:54:12 AM, Harnum, Alan (aharnum at ocadu.ca) wrote:

The essential issue is that as currently stands Infusion's build process
and publication to NPM makes it less than friendly for use in automating
build processes for front-end (in-browser) use.

- PR comment that started this thread of conversation:
https://github.com/fluid-project/myl3/pull/1#discussion_r75114980
- Relevant IRC chat start:
https://botbot.me/freenode/fluid-work/2016-08-17/?msg=71467811&page=1

The long-term remedy for this may be making Infusion work well with the
current generation of front-end build tools like Browserify or web pack,
but in the more immediate term, it was proposed to estimate the effort to
produce a distribution structure like the following gist as part of the
published NPM package:
https://gist.github.com/waharnum/4d1f3845ce6b8dc7ed6d4c9dcd23f69e.

Many NPM libraries that can be used in-browser include a `/dist` directory
or similar that contains a selection of suitable (concatenated / minified /
etc) front-end artifacts. The proposed structure above tries to more easily
accommodate two basic use cases:

   - applications with in-browser Infusion as a dependency that only wish
   to use the framework pieces (both with and without the jQuery dependency)
   - applications with in-browser Infusion as a dependency that wish to
   additionally use various interface components that include JS along with
   HTML, images and CSS assets

Per previous discussion in March (
http://lists.idrc.ocad.ca/pipermail/fluid-work/2016-March/009894.html), my
various browser-based (non-node) projects with Infusion + 3rd party
libraries as dependencies uses NPM + grunt only to manage the "install"
process; Infusion itself is, for the reasons stated in the PR comment
above, resistant to this approach, and continues to be checked in directly
as a dependency. We'd like to address this, and it seems better to spend a
little time doing so at the root of the issue than for me to do so via
grunt in each of my projects.

Comments are invited about the approach/goal described above – there is
some discussion about trying to accomplish this for the Infusion 2.0
release. Justin O & I discussed & think it might be possible to achieve it
relatively quickly using existing build tools.

*ALAN HARNUM*
SENIOR INCLUSIVE DEVELOPER
INCLUSIVE DESIGN RESEARCH CENTRE, OCAD UNIVERSITY

*E *aharnum at ocadu.ca <//aharnum at ocadu.ca>

*OCAD UNIVERSITY*
100 McCaul Street, Toronto, Canada, M5T 1W1
www.ocadu.ca <http://ocadu.ca/>
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