What do you not like about DefinitelyTyped as a user and contributor?

What do you not like about DefinitelyTyped as a user and contributor?

Hey folks, we, the TypeScript team at Microsoft, are interested in understanding pain points for people using and contributing to DefinitelyTyped.

About this time last year, we drastically changed the workflow for contributors to DefinitelyTyped (one of the most active repos on GitHub) to allow for self-serving Pull Requests. Since then, we’ve been refining that process and improving the automation to cover more cases and consolidated all of the DefinitelyTyped tooling into one monorepo and re-vamped the search. Now that these systems have matured, we’re thinking about what the right things to look at next, and would love input from the folks who are writing definitions daily.

I’ve explicitly given an opening for users of @types to provide feedback here too, given that it’s quite likely any requests as a user of DT will affect contributors too.

We’ve used a format for this before which worked well in https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/31983 which is for people to reply to this issue with a single idea per comment.

We’ve got a meeting booked on the 20th to go through feedback and see what’s we can do 👍🏻

Please do: reply with 1 comment per issue. Add tags if you’d like to help with search for others and ease-of classification. If you have a link to an existing issue, that would be super useful too.

If you see that someone has already pitched your idea, please use the emoji reactions to +1 it, we will be deleting duplicates and off-topic replies. If you want to add more to a topic, see if it has an attached issue and leave more feedback there. If there isn’t, come chat in the DefinitelyTyped chatroom in the TypeScript Community Discord.

Please do not use this thread for discussions about the TypeScript language itself, and as with all issues please conform to the code of conduct. We all want to see improvements.

Template - feel free to copy & paste

### [title]

[message]

Tags: `[tags]`

For example

One of mine:

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There is no REPL for Type Definitions

I would like to use the Playground to work with .d.ts files to be able to share problems with others

Tags: playground

---

[dylang]

npm deprecate type package once the original package has types.

Unless we see an announcement in a changelog or release notes, it’s difficult to know when we can remove an @types package from our repository.

Example: webpack@5 now includes types, so @types/webpack can be removed. The deprecation message would be something like Webpack now includes types starting at 5.0.0. You can safely remove @types/webpack.

npm deprecate allows deprecating of a version range, so we’d just deprecate @types/webpack@>=5.0.0

https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v7/commands/npm-deprecate

Tags: deprecation, deprecate, old @types

[dylang]

Link homepage in package.json to the exact page where the type source is located on Github.

Example type: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@types/webpack-dev-middleware

Currently we see:

Homepage: https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped#readme Repository: https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped#readme

This makes it hard to see what the types look like before installing them, or where to find them if we want to make changes.

Ideally, homepage in the package.json would link to something like https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped/tree/master/types/webpack-dev-middleware - and perhaps an automatically generated README.md on that page specific to this project.

Tags: homepage, repository