conventional-changelog and its dependencies

General Informaitions

Recently i started investigating and making small pull requests to reduce/simplify dependency graph for packages from this repository

• importing conventional-changelog requires you to download 157 dependencies https://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/conventional-changelog
• importing git-raw-commints requires you to download 78 dependencies https://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/git-raw-commits
• importing just a parser requires you to download 89 https://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/conventional-commits-parser

as reference:

• @babel/core - 40 dependencies - https://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/%2540babel%252Fcore
• @babel/cli - 22 dependencies - https://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/%2540babel%252Fcli
• yargs - 16 dependencies - https://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/yargs
• meow - 66 dependencies - https://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/meow
• mocha - 96 dependencies - https://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/mocha
• eslint - 108 dependencies - https://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/eslint

https://snyk.io/blog/how-to-maintain-npm-dependencies-in-your-project/

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Recommended refactoring:

split cli logic from packages, as consumers of your packages does not require this functionality at all

example: introduce new package git-raw-commits-api and move index.js from git-raw-commits git-raw-commits should depend on git-raw-commits-api and can rexeport all functionality to index for backward compatibility, that should remove requirement of installing cli for packages from within this project or external consumers

• lerna
• commitlint
• git-commits-since
• autorelease
• conventional-git-log
• semantic-release-github

https://www.npmjs.com/browse/depended/git-raw-commits

in case of this package this split changes number of used packages from 78 to 9

This should be applied to all packages that provide cli as other libraries does not require cli at all

note: name is just an example

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Progress so far

Some smaller changes that should remove deprecated, not maintained or unnecessary dependencies:

• #742 - q - it was a great package when promises where not available [not maintained]
• #750 - pinkie-promise - polyfill for Promise [not maintained]
• #745 - object-assign - polyfill for Object.assign that is needed for node less than 4 [not maintained]
• #748 - fs-access - polyfill for fs.access that is needed for node less than 0.12 [not maintained]
• #749 - sprintf-js - all functionality that we are using from it is natively supported
• #747 - modify-values - can be replaced by reusing lodash/mapValues
• #752 - shelljs - unnecessary used as there is single line native alternative
• #751 - temp, tmp - there is no point in using both of them, as they provide ~same functionality
• #758 - lodash isFunction - we can safely use native typeof check

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there is a lot more dependencies that could be replaced by more popular alternatives or replaced with native alternatives, but before i proceed I’d like to verify that those changes are something what is wanted in this project.

@bcoe what do you think about this?

[bcoe]

are you planning to replace current parser with it? i checked out code and it looks way cleaner than what is in here

The problem is that the parser is written specifically for the conventional commit spec, whereas this codebase is more generic.

[bcoe]

@armano2 I like the idea of trimming down dependencies, and feel like we have good enough coverage to do so.

Separate to this work, I actually rewrote the parser for my team:

https://github.com/conventional-commits/parser

Partially because I wanted a more concise implementation.